“Find what you love and let it kill you.”
— Charles Bukowski
“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.”
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
“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.”
“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
“Life’s as kind as you let it be.”
“Without literature, life is hell.”
“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.”
“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
“You have to die a few times before you can really live.”
“I don’t hate people. I just feel better when they aren’t around.”
“I have no time for things that have no soul.”
“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.”
“We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Wherever the crowd goes run in the other direction. They’re always wrong.”
“Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.”
“The less I needed, the better I felt.”
“Nothing can save you except writing. It keeps the walls from failing.”
“Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself.”
“Drink from the well of yourself and begin again.”
“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.”
“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.”
“If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.”
“People empty me. I have to get away to refill.”
“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.”
“There’s a light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness.”
“Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity.”
““Baby,” I said, “I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me.””
“I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn’t a nightmare.”
“If you’re going to try, go all the way. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe your mind.”
“The world is full of boring, identical and mindless people.”
“My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.”
“Only the boring get bored.”
“The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it.”
“It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.”
“If you let them kill you, they will.”
“Those who escape hell however never talk about it and nothing much bothers them after that.”
“Beware of those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone.”
“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.”
“Love breaks my bones and I laugh.”
“The empty, the angry, the lonely, the tricked, we are all museums of fear.”
“My ambition is handicapped by laziness.”
“I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can’t feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”
“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.”
“Let it die. Let there be a new beginning. It’s awful. Goodnight.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The courage it took to get out of bed each morning to face the same things over and over was enormous.”
“I’ve had so many knives stuck into me, when they hand me a flower I can’t quite make out what it is. It takes time.”
“It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.”
“The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest; true creation is a solitary act.”
“There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out.”
“If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.”
“Death is not the problem; waiting around for it is.”
“There is a place in the heart that will never be filled; a space. And even during the best moments, and the greatest times, we will know it.”
“You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”
“If I stop writing I am dead. And that’s the only way I’ll stop: dead.”
“We are all museums of fear.”
“Before my death I hope to obtain my life.”
“Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.”
“There’s music in everything, even defeat.”
“The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you’ll live ten times longer than if you have ten. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever.”
“I am a poem. There is no way out.”
“If I never see you again I will always carry you inside outside on my fingertips and at brain edges and in centers centers of what I am of what remains.”
“The area dividing the brain and the soul Is affected in many ways by experience – Some lose all mind and become soul: insane. Some lose all soul and become mind: intellectual. Some lose both and become: accepted.”
“The secret is writing down one simple line after another.”
“Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.”
“To create art means to be crazy alone forever.”
“Why did I come here? I thought. Why is it always only a matter of choosing between something bad and something worse?”
“I want to let her know though that all the nights sleeping beside her even the useless arguments were things ever splendid and the hard words I ever feared to say can now be said: I love you.”
“And yet women-good women – frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.”
“That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man.”
“I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.”
“Lighting new cigarettes, pouring more drinks. It has been a beautiful fight. Still is.”
“I never met another man I’d rather be. And even if that’s a delusion, it’s a lucky one.”
“Existence was not only absurd, it was plain hard work. Think of how many times you put on your underwear in a lifetime. It was appalling, it was disgusting, it was stupid.”
“Bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything well.”
“Look, let me put it this way: with me, you’re number one and there isn’t even a number two.”
“I no longer want it all, just some comfort and some sex and some minor love.”
“I am ashamed to be a member of the human race but I don’t want to add any more to that shame, I want to scrape a little of it off.”
“There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you.”
“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.”
“Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit.”
“I can almost understand why people leap from bridges.”
“People don’t need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn’t be.”
“Each man’s hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind my ruined face.”
“I’m too careless. I don’t put out enough effort. I’m tired.”
“Humanity, you never had it to begin with.”
“Lawyers, doctors, plumbers, they all made the money. Writers? Writers starved. Writers suicided. Writers went mad.”
“Those who preach god, need god Those who preach peace do not have peace Those who preach love do not have love.”
“Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem.”
“It’s not so much that nothing means anything but more that it keeps meaning nothing. there’s no release, just gurus and self- appointed gods and hucksters. the more people say, the less there is to say. even the best books are dry sawdust.”
“I guess we often get the deep blues, both of us, and wonder what it all means- the people, the buildings, the day by day things, the waste of time, of ourselves.”
“All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was alway controlling who got a chance and who didn’t.”
“Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”
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