Top 450 Charles Bukowski Quotes (2023 Update)

1. “Find what you love and let it kill you.”

— Charles Bukowski

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2. “If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Quotes About Trying

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Faith Quotes, Humor Quotes

5. “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.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Quotes About World, Soul Quotes

6. “If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Fighting Quotes, Quotes About Night, Quotes About Laughter

7. “Life’s as kind as you let it be.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

9. “Without literature, life is hell.”

— Charles Bukowski

10. “An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”

— Charles Bukowski

11. “I don’t hate people. I just feel better when they aren’t around.”

— Charles Bukowski

12. “I have no time for things that have no soul.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Soul Quotes

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

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Quotes About Laughing

14. “If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Book Quotes, Desire Quotes, Soul Quotes

15. “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.”

— Charles Bukowski

16. “Wherever the crowd goes run in the other direction. They’re always wrong.”

— Charles Bukowski

17. “The less I needed, the better I felt.”

— Charles Bukowski

18. “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.”

— Charles Bukowski

19. “Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself.”

— Charles Bukowski

20. “Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.”

— Charles Bukowski

21. “Nothing can save you except writing. It keeps the walls from failing.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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23. “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.”

— Charles Bukowski

24. “Drink from the well of yourself and begin again.”

— Charles Bukowski

25. “Don’t fight your demons. Your demons are here to teach you lessons. Sit down with your demons and have a drink and a chat and learn their names and talk about the burns on their fingers and scratches on their ankles. Some of them are very nice.”

— Charles Bukowski

26. “I wanted the whole world or nothing.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Quotes About World

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

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Pain Quotes

28. “I have one problem, I don’t hate people. They disgust me and I want to get away from them. I do not have hatred. I have an escape mechanism.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Hate Quotes

29. “You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. And the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. Your life is your life. Know it while you have it.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Quotes About Light

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

— Charles Bukowski

31. “There’s a light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Quotes About Light

32. “Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Simplicity Quotes

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

— Charles Bukowski

34. “If you’re going to try, go all the way. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe your mind.”

— Charles Bukowski

35. “If you let them kill you, they will.”

— Charles Bukowski

36. ““Baby,” I said, “I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me.””

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Genius Quotes

37. “Only the boring get bored.”

— Charles Bukowski

38. “The world is full of boring, identical and mindless people.”

— Charles Bukowski

39. “If you are going to try, go all the way or don’t even start. If you follow it you will be alive with the gods. It is the only good fight there is.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Fighting Quotes, Quotes About Trying

40. “Beware of those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone.”

— Charles Bukowski

41. “It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.”

— Charles Bukowski

42. “My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.”

— Charles Bukowski

43. “The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Soul Quotes

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

— Charles Bukowski

45. “My ambition is handicapped by laziness.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Ambition Quotes

46. “Love breaks my bones and I laugh.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Quotes About Laughing

47. “I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Loneliness Quotes

48. “I am not a snob; it is simply that I am not interested with what most people have to say, or what they want to do – mostly with my time.”

— Charles Bukowski

49. “The empty, the angry, the lonely, the tricked, we are all museums of fear.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Lonely Quotes

50. “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.”

— Charles Bukowski

Featured in: Quotes About Trust