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Charles Bukowski

73 quotes

“there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you. ...I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep. ...he's singing a little in there, I haven't quite let him die ...and it's nice enough to make a man weep, but I don't weep,do you?”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“a woman can drop out of your life and forget you real fast. a woman can't go anywhere but UP after leaving you, honey.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“there were these people on the ground, they were reaching up their arms and trying to pull me down but they couldn't do it. I felt like pissing on them. they were so jealous. all they had to do was to work their way slowly up to it as I had done. such people think success grows on trees. you and I, we know better.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes I felt that I didn’t even know who I was. All right, I’m Nicky Belane. But check this. Somebody could yell out, ‘Hey, Harry! Harry Martel!’ and I’d most likely answer, ‘Yeah, what is it?’ I mean, I could be anybody, what does it matter?”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man was born to die. What did it mean? Hanging around and waiting. Waiting for the ‘A train.’ Waiting for a pair of big breasts on some August night in a Vegas hotel room. Waiting for the mouse to sing. Waiting for the snake to grow wings. Hanging around.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hell was what you made it.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sex was a trap, a snare. It was for animals.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Something was always after a man. It never relented. No rest, ever.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the words have come and gone, I sit ill. the phone rings, the cats sleep. Linda vacuums. I am waiting to live, waiting to die. I wish I could ring in some bravery. it's a lousy fix”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lines from "So now?" - p.402 (circa 1994. He died in March 1994, aged 73.)
“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.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“LSD, yeah, the big parade – everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I'm an ass, I should say so. If I don't, somebody else will. If I say it first, that disarms them.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Robert Wennersten (1974)
“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stonewritten. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Meaning of Life: The Big Picture", Life Magazine (December 1988)
“I found out that Hollywood is more crooked, dumber, crueler, stupider than all the books I've read about it. They didn't go deeply enough into how it lacks art, and soul, and heart— how it's really a piece of crap. There are too many hands directing, there're too many fingers in the pot, and they're all kind of ignorant about what they're doing. They're greedy, and they're vicious. So you don't get much of a movie.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Look, you're small-town. I've had over 50 jobs, maybe a hundred. I've never stayed anywhere long. What I am trying to say is, there is a certain game played in offices all over America. The people are bored, they don't know what to do, so they play the office-romance game. Most of the time it means nothing but the passing of time. Sometimes they do manage to work off a screw or two on the side. But even then, it is just an offhand pasttime, like bowling or t.v. or a New Year's Eve party. You've got to understand that it doesn't mean anything and then you won't get hurt. Do you understand what I mean?”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The bus ran along a very narrow strip of cement that stood up out of the water with no guard-rail, no nothing; that's all there was to it. The bus driver leaned back and we roared along over this narrow cement strip surrounded by water and all the people in the bus, the twenty-five or forty or fifty-two people trusted him, but I never did. Sometimes it was a new driver, and I thought, how do they select these sons of bitches? There's deep water on both sides of us and with one error of judgement he'll kill us all. It was ridiculous. Suppose he had an argument with his wife that morning? Or cancer? Or visions of God? Bad teeth? Anything. He could do it. Dump us all. I knew that if I was driving that I would consider the possibility or desirability of drowning everybody. And sometimes, after just such considerations, possibility turns into reality. For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter. The old story of good and evil. But none of the bus drivers ever dumped us. They were thinking instead of car payments, baseball scores, haircuts, vacations, enemas, family visits. There wasn't a real man in the whole shitload.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Janeway Smithson was a little, insane, grey-haired bantam rooster of a man. He loaded five or six of us in one cab, and we rolled down to the bed of the L.A. River. Now in those days the L.A. River was a fake - there was no water, just a wide, flat, dry cement runway. The bums lived down there by the hundreds in little cement alcoves under the bridges and overpasses. Some of them even had potted plants in front of their places. All they needed to live like kings was canned heat (Sterno) and what they picked out of the nearby garbage dump. They were tan and relaxed and most of them looked a hell of a lot healthier than the average Los Angeles business man. Those guys down there had no problems with women, income tax, landlords, burial expenses, dentists, time payments, car repairs, or with climbing into a voting booth and pulling the curtain closed.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Bach, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And my own affairs were as bad, as dismal, as the day I had been born. The only difference was that now I could drink now and then, though never often enough. Drink was the only thing that kept a man from feeling forever stunned and useless. Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought. God, they all had assholes and sexual organs and their mouths and their armpits. They shit and they chattered and they were dull as horse dung. The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun. I would certainly never be able to be happy, to get married, I could never have children. Hell, I couldn't even get a job as a dishwasher.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... don't wait for the good woman. She doesn't exist. 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. The female loves to play man against man, and if she is in a position to do it there is not one who will not resist. The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal. and torture and damnation. Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) said by 1994 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that everything should be made available to everybody, and I mean LSD, cocaine, codeine, grass, opium, the works. Nothing on earth available to any man should be confiscated and made unlawful by other men in more seemingly powerful and advantageous positions. More often than not Democratic Law works to the advantage of the few even though the many have voted; this, of course, is because the few have told them how to vote. I grow tired of 18th century moralities in a 20th century space-atomic age. If I want to kill myself I feel that should be my business. If I go out and hold up gas stations at night to pay for my supply it is because the law inflates a very cheap thing into an escalated war against my nerves and my soul.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: This Floundering Old Bastard is the Best Damn Poet in Town", interview by John Thomas, in LA Free Press (1967)