Living on Luck Quotes

“If I never see you again
I will always carry you
inside
outside

on my fingertips
and at brain edges

and in centers
centers
of what I am of
what remains.”
― Charles Bukowski, Living on Luck

“My revolution is a one-man revolution and almost everybody is the enemy. I may not be doing a great deal of damage, but at least I’m not bullshitting.”
― Charles Bukowski, Living on Luck

“I saw headline in paper: CONGRESS VOWS FIGHT ON CRIME. and I almost sat down and wrote a mother essay, 8 or 9 pages on what crime IS and what it APPEARS to be, how our whole social structure houses and pardons and builds laws for everyday sanctioned robbery and crime against each other, whereas a direct and HONEST CRIME is punished by police, judges, juries. the difference says our society is this: you can take a lot and give a little, but you can’t take everything and give nothing. this is the essential difference between Capitalism and the Gun, and the reason why all judges, juries, cops are finks. the dope bit is all the same—it isn’t the dope that matters to them; it’s how you get it, who hands it to you. if it’s in the doctor’s handwriting it’s all right, he is supposed to know whether you need dope or not, that’s why he is so well-paid. but who knows better than I DO WHETHER I NEED DOPE OR NOT? who knows whether I need oranges or eggs or sex or sleep or dope? I do. Who knows whether I am sick or not? the doctor? who is more IMPORTANT? why is everything twisted backwards? but you know all this.”
― charles bukowski, Living on Luck

“December 21, 1970 well, the amateur drunks have taken over and will hold this town until Jan. 2…driving on the wrong side of the street, running red lights, bellowing the same songs. figs of people, twigs of people, shits of people…MERRY CHRISTMAS, HAPPY NEW YEAR. Christomighty, yeah.”
― Charles Bukowski, Living on Luck

“The idea, of course, might be to let them know that writing needn’t be hard work; the hard work is getting out of bed in the morning or at noon; the hard work is looking at people’s faces in long supermarket lines; the hard work is working for somebody else who is making money using your life’s hours and years.”
― Charles Bukowski, Living on Luck

“And when you write a poem within the accepted poem-form, making it sound like a poem because a poem is a poem is a poem, you are saying “good morning” in that poem, and well, your morals are straight and you have not said SHIT, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could…instead of sweating out the correct image, the precise phrase, the turn of a thought…simply sit down and write the god damned thing, throwing on the color and sound, shaking us alive with the force, the blackbirds, the wheat fields, the ear in the hand of the whore, sun, sun, sun, SUN!; let’s make poetry the way we make love; let’s make poetry and leave the laws and the rules and the morals to the churches and the politicians; let’s make poetry the way we tilt the head back for the good liquor; let a drunken bum make his flame, and some day, Robert, I’ll think of you, pretty and difficult, measuring vowels and adverbs, making rules instead of poetry.”
― Charles Bukowski, Living on Luck

“And when Tolstoy found God his lines went limp, and Turgenev on his deathbed grieved for him because although Tolstoy had given up his land and his coppers for God, he had also given up something else. And although Dostoevski ended up on believing in Christ, he took the long road to get there, a most interesting and perhaps unwholesome road over roulette tables, raping a small child, standing before a wall waiting for the rifles to fire, he found that “adversity is the main-spring of self-realism,” he found his Christ, but what a most interesting Christ, a self-made Christ, and I bow to him.”
― Charles Bukowski, Living on Luck

“it’s the same for most of us but one of the best things I learned was to stay out of the bars and also to try to stay off the street. I fail sometimes to stay off the streets but not too often. the finest place on earth to drink is in your own place and alone. you probably know all this. all right.”
― Charles Bukowski, Living on Luck

“Writing poems is not difficult, living them is.”
― Charles Bukowski, Living on Luck