Charles Bukowski quote: "I will remember the kisses our lips raw with love and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me, and I will remember your small room the feel of you the light in the window your records your books our morning coffee our noons our nights our bodies spilled together sleeping the tiny flowing currents immediate and forever your leg my leg your arm my arm your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again."

I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each d...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Find what you love and let it kill you.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I wish to weep
but sorrow is
stupid.
I wish to believe
but belief is a
grav...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

That is what friendship means. Sharing the prejudice of experience.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show yo...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Never get out of bed before noon
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part -a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lo...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shak...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Before you kill something make sure you have something better to replace it with; something better t...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The pest, in a sense, is a very superior being to us: he knows where to find us and how --usually in...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the loc...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

What a pitiful mass of dangerous nothing
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Uno se puede encariñar de muchas cosas aparte del sexo pero es mejor si el sexo está presente de a...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Beasts bounding through time.

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway tes...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this CHARLES BUKOWSKI

We’ve all heard that little woman who says, “Oh, it’s terrible what these young people do to t...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I dislike interaction. The less I say the better I feel. I was naturally a loner. I didn’t want co...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I have, he went on, betrayed myself with
belief, deluded myself with love
tricked myself w...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

people are worn away with striving, they hide in common habits. their concerns are herd concerns. fe...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

well, death says, as he walks by, I'm going to get you anyhow no matter what you've been: writer, ca...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

not writing is not good but trying to write when you can't is worse.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

great books are the ones we need
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

young or old, good or bad, I don't think anything dies as slow and as hard as a writer.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I'm becoming softer and softer.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

People empty me. I have to get away to refill.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep hi...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Life's as kind as you let it be.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I take much pleasure in being alone
but there is also a strange warm grace in not being alone.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

some moments are nice, some are
nicer, some are even worth
writing
about.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

To do a dull thing with style-now THAT'S what I call art.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or poli...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I went to the kitchen and felt-up the turkey.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Music is much like fucking, but some composers can't climax and others climax too often, leaving the...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

for me
obedience to another is the decay
of self
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I see a bright
portion
under the overhead light

that shades into
darkness<...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Getting drunk was good. I decided that I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious a...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Fiction is an improvement on life
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was alway controlling who got a chance and who didn't.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

in this land some of us fuck more than
we die but most of us die
better than we fuck
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can't even cry.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

it's good to have things done with
when they don't work
it's also good not to hate
or...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

love needs too much help, he said.
hate takes care of itself.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Medju nama nije bilo nikakve veze, osim sto smo pili i vodili ljubav.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

You get so alone at times that it just makes sense.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Cats tell me without effort all that there is to know.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Being a common laborer all my life at poor and underpaid jobs, I had worked with more black men, kno...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I can see where
creation often
stops while the
body still lives
and often
d...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can'...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Without literature, life is hell.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

to fight for each minute is to
fight for what is possible within
yourself,
so that y...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, id...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

People don't need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it need...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

It’s so easy to be easy—if you let it.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I thought you were sane," I said, "but you're
just as crazy as the rest of them.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I hope that death contains
less than this.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

stay with the beer.

beer is continuous blood.

a continuous lover.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

and you invented me
and I invented you
and that's why we don't
get along
on this...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

she is no longer
the beautiful woman
she was. she sends
photos of herself
sittin...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

the whole world is caught in her glance
and at last
the universe is
magnificent.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I was glad I wasn't in love, that I wasn't happy with the world. I like being at odds with everythin...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

She was desperate and she was choosey
at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn'...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I'm fucking the grave, I thought, I'm bringing the dead back to life...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

MAILMAN CAUGHT DRINKING THE BLOOD OF GOD AND TAKING A SHOWER, NAKED, IN ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I went home each night dizzy and sick. He was murdering me with the sound of his voice.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

She seemed a bit crazy but I kept looking at her body and I didn't care.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Let' em learn or let' em die
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

And it seems people should not build houses anymore
it seems people should stop working and sit...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

There's nothing like privacy. You know, I like people. It's nice that they might like my books and a...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

we
sat there
smoking
cigarettes
at
5
in the morning.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

What is your advice to young writers?”
“Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Look, let me put it this way: with me, you’re number one and there isn’t even a number two.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll sho...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it d...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

To do a dull thing with style-now THAT'S what I call art.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

the pleasures of the damned
are limited to brief moments
of happiness:
like eyes in t...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

When women agree with me I always do the other thing
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I like to prowl ordinary places.
I feel sorry for us all or glad for us
all
caught a...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I like to prowl ordinary places
and taste the people-
from a distance.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I used to live on one candy bar a day - it cost a nickel. I always remember the candy bar was called...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Beauty is nothing, beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if pe...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I
think that the
world should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, just
cats...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

how come you're so ugly?"

"my life has hardly been pretty — the hospitals, the jails, t...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Now we are citizens of nothing. the sun itself knows the sad truth of how we surrendered our lives a...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I think I need a drink.'
'Almost everybody does only they don't know it.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

There would never be a way for me to live comfortably with people. Maybe I'd become a monk. I'd pret...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

as long as there are
human beings about
there is never going to be
any peace
for...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Writing is its own intoxication.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

if I had a book or a drink then I didn’t think too much of other things—fools create their own p...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

a bird no one wants. he’s mine. my bird of pain. he doesn’t sing. that bird swaying on the bough...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I often carry things to read
so that I will not have to look at
the people.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I drive around the streets
an inch away from weeping,
ashamed of my sentimentality and
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I didn't know who to
believe
but
one thing I do
know: when a man is
living<...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

you've got to burn
straight up and down
and then maybe sidewise
for a while
and ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

You can't overestimate the stupidity of the general public.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Like anybody can tell you, I am not a very nice man. I don't know the word. I have
always admi...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

It seemed better to delay thinking.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The dog approached again, cautiously. I found the bologna sandwich, ripped off a chunk, wiped the ch...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Turgenev was a very serious fellow but he could make me laugh because a truth first encountered can ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

just heard a commercial
which told me
Farmer John smokes his own
bacon.
now, the...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

So, that’s what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That’s what they needed. People were fools. I...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

And my own affairs were as bad, as dismal, as the day I had been born. The only difference was that ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire.... Pain arrives, BANG, and there it i...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without amb...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

This is very important -- to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and d...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

‎"she’ mad but she’
magic. there’ no lie in her fire.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I have one problem, I don’t hate people. They disgust me and I want to get away from them. I do no...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

love
iz
a
big
fat
turkey
and
every
day
iz
thanksgi...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

She was perfect, pure maddening sex, and she knew it, and she played on it, dripped it, and allowed ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

we know God is dead, they've told us, but listening to you I wasn't sure.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

If there are junk yards in hell, love is the dog that guards the gates.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

your letters got sadder. your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. it didn't h...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

there is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to de...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I like the way Mahler wandered about in his music and still retained his
passion. He must have ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I have been treated better than I should have been---not by life in general nor by the machinery of ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Life is and is not a gentle bore.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The place trembled with sound. I didn't need to do anything. They would do it all. But you had to be...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Well it’s good to have a car like that, once in a while somebody’ll say, ‘why don’t you come...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I wanted the whole world or nothing.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

people diminish me;
the longer I sit and listen to them
the more empty I feel but I don't...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into th...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

your best men are
drunks and your worst men are
locking them
up,
your best men a...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women, it is because of these who I met were that. Th...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
t...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

they simply never understand,
do they,
that sometimes solitude
is
one of the mos...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I didn't have any friends at school, didn't want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench an...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

dogs and angels are not
very far apart
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled

a space

and even ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Lighting new cigarettes,
pouring more
drinks.

It has been a beautiful
fi...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I had a dream about you. I opened your chest like a cabinet, it had doors, and when I opened the doo...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

be it peace or happiness
let it enfold you
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Beware
Those Who
Are ALWAYS
READING
BOOKS
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

jan was an excellent fuck...she had a tight pussy and she took it like it was a knife that was killi...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I wasn't much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

There's nothing unusual about love.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

God knows I am not too hippy. Perhaps because I am too much around the hip and I fear fads for, like...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Courage comes from the belly - all else is desperation.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

It was sad, it was sad, it was sad. When Betty came back we didn't sing or laugh, or even argue. We ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Well, people got attatched. Once you cut the umbilical cord they attatched to the other things. Sigh...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I killed four flies while waiting. Damn, death was everywhere. Man, bird, beast, reptile, rodent, in...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of every...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don'...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exac...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I do not like the human race. I don't like their heads, I don't like their faces, I don'...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The telephone is needed for
Emergency purposes only
These people are not
Emergencies,...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

when we were kids
laying around the lawn
on our
bellies

we often talked CHARLES BUKOWSKI

There are worse things than being alone,
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

you boys can keep your virgins
give me hot old women in high heels
with asses that forgo...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfrie...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Style is the answer to everything.
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing
To do...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

My flesh looked like it wasn't trying. It looked like it hated being part of me.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly matter...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

they thought that writing had
something to do with
the politics of the
thing.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

another hot summer night as I sit here and play at being a writer again. and the worst thing of cour...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Living too long takes more than time
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

But you know, my former life as a bibliophile, it possibly kept me from murdering somebody, myself i...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Charles Bukowski

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