Charles Bukowski Quotes

"Baby," I said, "I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me."

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.

You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.

you boys can keep your virgins
give me hot old women in high heels
with asses that forgot to get old.

there is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy

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

Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you'll never meet them. All right, so we do the best we can. Granted. But we must still realize that love is just the result of a chance encounter. Most people make too much of it. On these grounds a good fuck is not to be entirely scorned. But that's the result of a chance meeting too. You're damned right. Drink up. We'll have another.

We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting

Life's as kind as you let it be.

my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.

great writers are indecent people
they live unfairly
saving the best part for paper.

good human beings save the world
so that bastards like me can keep creating art,
become immortal.
if you read this after I am dead
it means I made it.

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

unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.

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