Charles Bukowski

From BillionQuotes

This people article needs cleanup. Please review Wikiquote:Templates, especially the standard format of people articles, to determine how to edit this article to conform to a higher standard of article quality.

Charles Bukowski (August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994), was a Los Angeles, California poet and novelist often mistakenly associated with Beat Generation writers because of alleged similarities of style and attitude. Bukowski's writing was heavily influenced by the geography and atmosphere of his home city of Los Angeles. He wrote more than fifty books and countless smaller pieces. He is often mentioned as an influence by contemporary authors and his style is frequently imitated.

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

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.

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.
- The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors have taken over the Ship

If I'm an ass, I should say so. If I don't, somebody else will. If I say it first, that disarms them. Interview with Robert Wennersten, 1974.

The human race aint got it man. it's a bad crowd

It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.

I have more faith in my plumber than I do the eternal being. Plumbers do a good job. They keep the shit flowing.

Somebody at one of these places asked me: What do you do? How do you write, create? You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like it's looks, you make a pet out of it.

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 stone-written. 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.

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.
- The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors have taken over the Ship

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
- Notes From a Dirty Old Man (1969)

I was given the job of milking the cows, finally, and it got me up earlier than anybody. But it was kind of nice, pulling at those cows' tits.
- Tales of ordinary madness pg 172 (1967-83)

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.
- in a letter to Steven Richmond (Published in Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by Howard Sounes)

... 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. Ofcourse, 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.
- in a letter to Steven Richmond (Published in Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by Howard Sounes)

An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.
- Notes From a Dirty Old Man (1969)

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

There is no such thing as beauty, especially in the human face. So many women that I'm told are beautiful...hell it's like looking at a soup bowl

Kindness is just about the best you can do.

The difference between a brave man and a coward is a coward thinks twice before jumping in the cage with a lion. The brave man doesn't know what a lion is. He just thinks he does.
- Notes From a Dirty Old Man (1969)

I think that everything should be made available to everybody, and I mean LSD, cocaine, codine, grass, opium, the works. Nothing on earth available to any man should be confiscated and made unlawful by other men in more seemingly powerfull 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.
- This Floundering Old Bastard is the Best Damn Poet in Town, interview, John Thomas, LA Free Press, 1967.