Essential Bukowski Quotes

“Brush your teeth with gasoline.
Sleep all day and climb trees at night.
Be a monk and drink buckshot and beer.
Hold your head under water and play the violin.
Do a belly dance before pink candles.
Kill your dog.
Run for mayor.
Live in a barrel.
Break your head with a hatchet.
Plant tulips in the rain.

But don't write any more poetry.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“roll the dice if you’re going to try, go all the
way.
otherwise, don’t get into it. if you’re going to try, go all the
way.
this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind. go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or
4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail, alcoholism,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“my typewriter is
tombstone
still. and I am
reduced to bird
watching.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“but now it’s the waiting on death.
it’s not death that’s the problem, it’s the waiting.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“Beware Those Who Seek Constant
Crowds; They Are Nothing
Alone”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“I am humanely destroyed, I am the horseplayer who
became the
racetrack.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“born into this
into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame—not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them,”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“he was rather a handsome guy
and I guess he was jealous because
I was so ugly.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“this then
will be my destiny:
scrabbling for pennies in dark tiny halls
reading poems I have long since become tired
of. and I used to think
that men who drove buses
or cleaned out latrines
or murdered men in alleys were
fools.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“blood money blood money
my god they must think I love this like the others
but it’s for bread and beer and rent
blood money”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“there is of course
madness and terror too
in knowing
that some part of you
wound up like a clock
can never be wound again
once it stops.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“destroying beauty a rose red sunlight; I take it apart in the garage like a puzzle: the petals are as greasy as old bacon and fall like the maidens of the world backs to floor and I look up at the old calendar hung from a nail and touch my wrinkled face and smile because the secret is beyond me.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“to the whore who took my poems
some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus:
12 poems gone and I don’t keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; it’s stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn’t you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I’m not Shakespeare
but sometimes simply
there won’t be any more, abstract or otherwise;
there’ll always be money and whores and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“to die on a kitchen floor at 7 o’clock in the morning while other people are frying eggs is not so rough unless it happens to you.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“and nothing, and nothing. the days of
the bosses, yellow men
with bad breath and big feet, men
who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk
as if melody had never been invented, men
who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and
profit, men with expensive wives they possess
like 60 acres of ground to be drilled
or shown-off or to be walled away from
the incompetent, men who’d kill you
because they’re crazy and justify it because
it’s the law, men who stand in front of
windows 30 feet wide and see nothing,
men with luxury yachts who can sail around
the world and yet never get out of their vest
pockets, men like snails, men like eels, men
like slugs, and not as good”
― Charles Bukowski, The Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“There is enough treachery, hatred,
Violence,
Absurdity in the average human
Being
To supply any given army on any given day.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“people are not good to each other.
perhaps if they were
our deaths would not be so sad.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“and soon we realized that
we were all lying, not
exactly lying but mostly”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“so we had to tell our
stories and they were
stories.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“and now sometimes I’m interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed
shot runover de-tailed cat before them and I say, “look, look
at this!”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“she’s mad but she’s
magic. there’s no lie in her fire.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“some people never go crazy.
what truly horrible lives
they must live.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“she is dark, she is dark
she is reading about God. I am God.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“we talk about what else
there might be to do,
but being together solves most of it,”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“Their Love Is Average, Seeks
Average
But There Is Genius In Their Hatred”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“we have everything and we have nothing.
some do it well enough for a while and
then give way. fame gets them or disgust
or age or lack of proper diet or ink
across the eyes or children in college
or new cars or broken backs while skiing
in Switzerland or new politics or new wives
or just natural change and decay—”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry

“two hollow emptinesses looking into each other,”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry