Top 450 Charles Bukowski Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “I grow tired of 18th century moralities in a 20th century space-atomic age.”

— Charles Bukowski

452. “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

453. “The public takes from a writer, or a writing, what it needs and lets the remainder go. but what they take is usually what they need least and what they let go is what they need most.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

455. “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

456. “Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.”

— Charles Bukowski

457. “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

458. “I have loved you woman as surely as I have named you rust and sand and nylon.”

— Charles Bukowski

459. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

461. “Banion wondered which was worse – being sodomized by aliens, or having to sit through two hours of Charles Ives.”

— Charles Bukowski

462. “It’s just that the grape has me down.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

464. “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

465. “They were beautiful nothings.”

— Charles Bukowski

466. “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

467. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

470. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

474. “I lie as truthfully as I can.”

— Charles Bukowski

475. “YOU DULL ME!”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

480. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

482. “I’m only interested in poetry.”

— Charles Bukowski

483. “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

484. “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

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

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

— Charles Bukowski

490. “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

491. “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

492. “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

493. “Don’t let anybody tell you different. Life begins at 65.”

— Charles Bukowski

494. “I felt that even the sun belonged to my father, that I had no right to it because it was shining upon my father’s house. I was like his roses, something that belonged to him and not to me.”

— Charles Bukowski

495. “Once she had been a little girl, someday she would be dead, but now she was showing me her upper legs.”

— Charles Bukowski

496. “I don’t think I was insane but many of the insane think that but i think now if anything saved me it was the avoidance of the crowd.”

— Charles Bukowski

497. “Some people don’t like anybody who is famous. Some people don’t like anybody who isn’t.”

— Charles Bukowski

498. “What foolishness makes us tweak the nose of Death continually?”

— Charles Bukowski