Charles Bukowski Quotes

554 Quotes for Challenging, Inspiring, and Questioning Life's Perspectives

“We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.”

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”

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

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

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

“Oh, I don’t mean you’re handsome, not the way people think of handsome. Your face seems kind. But your eyes - they’re beautiful. They’re wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a forest on fire.”

“Beauty is nothing, beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it’s for something else.”

“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid one are full of confidence.”

“Do you hate people?”

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

“I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.”

“Of course it's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.”

“A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.”

“Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It's like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss.”

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

“I didn't have any friends at school, didn't want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to me.”

“Never trust a man in a jumpsuit”

“She's mad, but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.”

“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.”

“I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.”

“People empty me. I have to get away to refill.”

“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”

“I never felt right being alone; sometimes it felt good but it never felt right.”

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

“Love breaks my
bones and I
laugh”

“I'm tired of waiting to die. Let's go out.”

“people run from rain but
sit
in bathtubs full of
water.”

“one can never be sure whether it's good poetry or bad acid”

“If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.”

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

“I am too sick to lay down
the sidewalks frighten me
the whole damned city frightens me,
what I will become
what I have become
frightens me.”

“That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”

“there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late”

“There is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy.”

“I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: "Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I'll be ready.”

“I will always carry you, inside, outside, on my fingertips, and at brain edges.”

“Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.”

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.”

“My ambition is handicapped by my laziness.”

“Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”

“I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn't a nightmare.”

“Life's as kind as you let it be.”

“she was consumed by 3 simple things:
drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more:
youth and beauty”

“Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their
lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn't so.”

“Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.”

“Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?”

“Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you.”

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

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

“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 love is a word used
too much and
much
too soon.”

“Don’t do it. Don’t love me.”

“we only asked for leopards to guard
our thinning dreams.”

“I want to be with you. It's as simple, and as complicated as that.”

“Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.”

“I no longer want it all, just some comfort and some sex and only a minor love.”

“I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.”

“Do some living and get yourself a typewriter.”

“Her eyes always had a frantic, lost look. He could never cure her eyes of that.”

“Money is like sex,' I said. 'It seems much more important when you don't have any…'

'You talk like a writer,' said Francois.”

“It all comes down to the last person you think of at night, that's where the heart is.”

“Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don't give a damn.”

“They wouldn't fire me. Even the salesmen liked me. They were robbing the boss out the back door but I didn't say anything. That was their little game. It didn't interest me. I wasn't much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing.”

“Some lose all mind and become soul, insane.
some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual.
some lose both and become accepted”

“those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that.”

“There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.”