Words matter. These are the best Charles Bukowski Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.
Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.
Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.
Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.
You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.
The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.
Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.
Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.
To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.
Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you’re feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you’ll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There’s nothing to get excited about. They just know. They’re saviours.
I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.
It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.
In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.
We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.
Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I’ll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.
I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.
My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‘light’ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.
I do not like the human race. I don’t like their heads, I don’t like their faces, I don’t like their feet, I don’t like their conversations, I don’t like their hairdos, I don’t like their automobiles.
To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.
Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.
I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.
Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.
Much publishing is done through politics, friends, and natural stupidity.
I used to live on one candy bar a day – it cost a nickel. I always remember the candy bar was called Payday. That was my payday. And that candy bar tasted so good, at night I would take one bite, and it was so beautiful.
An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don’t like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don’t like to be shaped by society.
Never get out of bed before noon.
What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.
When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.
There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.
If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.
Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.
The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you’ll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It’s truly ridiculous.
I would be married, but I’d have no wife, I would be married to a single life.
If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.
We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.
I don’t like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.
The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it, there is not one who will resist.
A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won’t let go.
