Top 450 Charles Bukowski Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “I went home each night dizzy and sick. He was murdering me with the sound of his voice.”

— Charles Bukowski

452. “I guess for me Hemingway is a lot like it is for others: he goes down well when we are young.”

— Charles Bukowski

453. “I grow tired of 18th century moralities in a 20th century space-atomic age.”

— Charles Bukowski

454. “Writers are nothing but beggars with a good line.”

— Charles Bukowski

455. “American women drove hard bargains and the ended up looking the worst for it. The few natural American women left were mostly in Texas and Louisiana.”

— Charles Bukowski

456. “People just don’t know how to write down a simple easy line. It’s difficult for them; it’s like trying to keep a hard-on while drowning – not many can do it.”

— Charles Bukowski

457. “It was only the matter of a new voice. Nobody listened to an old voice anymore. Old voices became a part of one’s self, like a fingernail.”

— Charles Bukowski

458. “I mean, say that you figure that everything is senseless, then it can’t be quite senseless because you are aware that it’s senseless and your awareness of senselessness almost gives it sense. You know what I mean?”

— Charles Bukowski

459. “I was so thin I could slice bread with my shoulderblades, only I seldom had bread.”

— Charles Bukowski

460. “I have been treated better than I should have been – not by life in general nor by the machinery of things but by women.”

— Charles Bukowski

461. “I’m going to open another vottle. not a vottle, but a bottle. you open it and I’ll drink it. and you try to write as much as I did without falling off of your chair.”

— Charles Bukowski

462. “Sweet Christ, you must know that a man will go further for any poem than for any woman ever born.”

— Charles Bukowski

463. “I pretend to understand because I don’t want anybody to be hurt.”

— Charles Bukowski

464. “They were beautiful nothings.”

— Charles Bukowski

465. “Some nights I knew that if I slept I would die.”

— Charles Bukowski

466. “As we go on with our lives we tend to forget that the jails and the hospitals and the madhouses and the graveyards are packed.”

— Charles Bukowski

467. “I’ll use the knives for spreading jam, and the gas to warm my greying love.”

— Charles Bukowski

468. “They laughed. Things were funny. They weren’t afraid to care. There was no sense to life, to the structure of things.”

— Charles Bukowski

469. “The writing’s easy, it’s the living that is sometimes difficult.”

— Charles Bukowski

470. “They, all of them, seemed to put literary form in front of the actuality and living of life itself.”

— Charles Bukowski

471. “YOU DULL ME!”

— Charles Bukowski

472. “It’s never quite right, all the things we are taught, all the loves we chase, all the deaths we die, all the lives we live.”

— Charles Bukowski

473. “I broke that town in half like a wooden match.”

— Charles Bukowski

474. “Well, we lost it, and that’s all there is to that.”

— Charles Bukowski

475. “I didn’t feel that way about it. I had been playing with death for some time. I can’t say we were the best of friends but we were well acquainted.”

— Charles Bukowski

476. “Experience can dull. With most men experience is a series of mistakes; the more experience you have the less you know.”

— Charles Bukowski

477. “I remember when each 4th lot was vacant and overgrown, and the landlord only go this rent when you had it, and each day was clear and good and each moment was full of promise.”

— Charles Bukowski

478. “I lie as truthfully as I can.”

— Charles Bukowski

479. “If you can hit a guy once, you can hit him twice.”

— Charles Bukowski

480. “I’m only interested in poetry.”

— Charles Bukowski

481. “I’ve found out why men sign their names to their works- not that they created them but more than the others did not.”

— Charles Bukowski

482. “I was an Agnostic. Agnostics didn’t have much to argue about.”

— Charles Bukowski

483. “Even the stove and the refrigerator looked human, I mean good human – they seemed to have arms and voices and they said, hang around, kid, it’s good here, it can be very good here.”

— Charles Bukowski

484. “He had long nostril hairs, powerfully intimidating, like an unscheduled nightmare.”

— Charles Bukowski

485. “I felt I had to win. It seemed very important. I didn’t know why it was important and I kept thinking, why do I think this is so important? And another part of me answered, just because it is.”

— Charles Bukowski

486. “An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.”

— Charles Bukowski

487. “There was nothing glorious about the life of a drinker or the life of a writer.”

— Charles Bukowski

488. “I could read the great books but the great books don’t interest me.”

— Charles Bukowski

489. “I don’t carry notebooks and I don’t consciously store ideas. I try not to think that I am a writer and I am pretty good at doing that. I don’t like writers, but then I don’t like insurance salesmen either.”

— Charles Bukowski

490. “Something that never happens anywhere at any time.”

— Charles Bukowski

491. “A dry period for me means perhaps going two or three nights without writing. I probably have dry periods but I’m not aware of them and I go on writing, only the writing probably isn’t much good.”

— Charles Bukowski

492. “Turgenev was a very serious fellow but he could make me laugh because a truth first encountered can be very funny. When someone else’s truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it just for you, that’s great.”

— Charles Bukowski