Charles Bukowski Quotes
“stay with the beer.
beer is continuous blood.
a continuous lover.”
Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell
“love be damned now
as love was damned when it
first arrived.”
Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last
Source: The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
“The less I needed, the better I felt.”
Variant: No, the less I see them the better i like them.
Source: Women
“What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.”
Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last
“Finally there is nothing here for death to take away.”
Source: What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
“When a hot woman meets a hermit one of them is going to change.”
Source: What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
“That was all a man needed: hope. It was a lack of hope that discouraged a man.”
Source: Factotum (1975), Ch. 29
Context: That was all a man needed: hope. It was a lack of hope that discouraged a man. I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.
Source: The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
“some men never
die
and some men never
live
but we're all alive
tonight.”
Source: You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
“I hope that death contains
less than this.”
Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell
“Dying should come easy:
like a freight train you
don't hear when
your back is
turned.”
Source: The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain: New Poems
Ham On Rye (1982)
Source: Ham on Rye
Context: 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.
Variant: Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat.
Source: Factotum
Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last
Source: What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
“in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.”
Source: The Pleasures of the Damned
“regret is mostly caused by not having
done anything.”
Source: You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
“we had such tremendous fun
and much agony together
for some years”
Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last
“I pretend to understand because I don't want anybody to be hurt”
Source: Hollywood
“I don't remember going to bed, but in the morning, there I was.”
Source: You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
“we know God is dead, they've told us, but listening to you I wasn't sure.”
Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell
“News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.”
Source: Ham on Rye
“life itself is not the miracle.
that pain should be so constant,
that's the miracle”
Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last
Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell
“To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art.”
Variant: It's better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.
