Charles Bukowski Quotes 554 Quotes for Challenging, Inspiring, and Questioning Life&#39;s Perspectives

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

Variant: Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

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

Variant: We don't even ask for happiness, just a little less pain.
Source: From a letter to William Packard from 1985 (published in Reach for the Sun - the 3rd volume of Bukowski correspondence)
Context: Sex, love, duty, God, family are not to be bargained with against happiness, and we don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.

Charles Bukowski book The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Variant: You have to die a few times before you actually live.
Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“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.”

“People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel hate or love.”

Charles Bukowski Quotes about people

“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.”

Source: Women (1978)

“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.”

Source: Women

Charles Bukowski book Tales of Ordinary Madness

Source: Tales of Ordinary Madness

“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.”

Variant: The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

“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.”

Source: Barfly

Charles Bukowski Quotes about love

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

The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors have taken over the Ship (1998)

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

Source: What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

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

Charles Bukowski book The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“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.”

Variant: 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.
Source: Women

“my mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile!
why don't you ever smile?"

and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw”

Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell

Charles Bukowski: Trending quotes

“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”

Charles Bukowski book Hot Water Music

Source: Hot Water Music

Charles Bukowski Quotes

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

a space

and even during the
best moments
and
the greatest times
times

we will know it

we will know it
more than
ever

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

we will wait
and
wait

in that space.”

“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.”

Variant: she’s mad, but she’s magic.

“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.”

"The Meaning of Life: The Big Picture", Life Magazine (December 1988)
Interviews

“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?”

Charles Bukowski book Factotum

Source: Factotum

“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.”

Variant: being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.
Source: Women

Charles Bukowski book Ham on Rye

Source: Ham on Rye

“Love breaks my
bones and I
laugh”

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

Charles Bukowski book Hot Water Music

Source: Hot Water Music

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

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

Source: The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

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

Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell

“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.”

Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell

Charles Bukowski book Mockingbird Wish Me Luck

Source: Mockingbird Wish Me Luck

“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”

Source: Women

“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.”

Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell

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

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

Charles Bukowski book Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Source: Notes of a Dirty Man (Zápisky starého prasáka)

“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.”

Charles Bukowski book Factotum

Source: Factotum (1975), Ch. 45, Manny

“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.”

Source: The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

Charles Bukowski book Hot Water Music

Source: Hot Water Music

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

Charles Bukowski book The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“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.”

Source: What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

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

Charles Bukowski book Post Office

Source: Post Office

“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.”

Variant: 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.
Source: Women (1978)

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

Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell

“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.”

Source: Women

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

“Don’t do it. Don’t love me.”

Source: The Night Torn Mad With Footsteps

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

Source: Women

Charles Bukowski book The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“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.”

Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell

Charles Bukowski book Tales of Ordinary Madness

Source: Tales of Ordinary Madness

“Do some living and get yourself a typewriter.”

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

Charles Bukowski book South of No North

Source: South of No North

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

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

Charles Bukowski book Hollywood

Source: Hollywood

“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.”

Original: Tutto si riduce all'ultima persona a cui pensi la notte, è lì che si trova il cuore.
Source: In Una sorcia bianca – nella raccolta Storie di ordinaria follia

“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.”

Charles Bukowski book Post Office

Variant: I wasn't much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing."
Source: Post Office (1971)

“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.”

Variant: Some lose all mind and become soul, insane. Some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual. Some lose both and become accepted.

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