Top 450 Charles Bukowski Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Charles Bukowski

102. “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”

— Charles Bukowski

103. “Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem.”

— Charles Bukowski

104. “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.”

— Charles Bukowski

105. “If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it.”

— Charles Bukowski

106. “All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was alway controlling who got a chance and who didn’t.”

— Charles Bukowski

107. “They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work.”

— Charles Bukowski

108. “Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing. To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.”

— Charles Bukowski

109. “Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.”

— Charles Bukowski

110. “Love is a Dog from Hell.”

— Charles Bukowski

111. “For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter.”

— Charles Bukowski

112. “Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”

— Charles Bukowski

113. “If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.”

— Charles Bukowski

114. “I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here.”

— Charles Bukowski

115. “To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.”

— Charles Bukowski

116. “I read my books at night, like that, under the quilt with the overheated reading lamp. Reading all those good lines while suffocating. It was magic.”

— Charles Bukowski

117. “It began as a mistake.”

— Charles Bukowski

118. “To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.”

— Charles Bukowski

119. “Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others.”

— Charles Bukowski

120. “Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they’ll spit on you.”

— Charles Bukowski

121. “Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.”

— Charles Bukowski

122. “I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”

— Charles Bukowski

123. “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.”

— Charles Bukowski

124. “If you can’t write the next line, well, you’re dead. The past doesn’t matter.”

— Charles Bukowski

125. “I write right off the typer. I call it my “machinegun.” I hit it hard, usually late at night while drinking wine and listening to classical music on the radio and smoking mangalore ganesh beedies.”

— Charles Bukowski

126. “That’s how it is with books, isn’t it: They’re not in a hurry. They’ll wait for you till you’re ready. People empty me. I have to go away to refill.”

— Charles Bukowski

127. “Beauty is nothing, beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it’s for something else.”

— Charles Bukowski

128. “The more crap you believe, the better off you are.”

— Charles Bukowski

129. “That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”

— Charles Bukowski

130. “The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life to a function that doesn’t interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative.”

— Charles Bukowski

131. “The Difference Between Art and Life is that Art is More Bearable.”

— Charles Bukowski

132. “There is nothing as boring as the truth.”

— Charles Bukowski

133. “I didn’t have any friends at school, didn’t want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to me.”

— Charles Bukowski

134. “To be young is the only religion.”

— Charles Bukowski

135. “They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.”

— Charles Bukowski

136. “Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.”

— Charles Bukowski

137. “Keep your money in your pocket. Or bet it on a good horse.”

— Charles Bukowski

138. “It’s 4:30 in the morning, it’s always 4:30 in the morning.”

— Charles Bukowski

139. “Many a good man has been put under the bridge by a woman.”

— Charles Bukowski

140. “Most of the world was mad. And the part that wasn’t mad was angry. And the part that wasn’t mad or angry was just stupid. I had no chance. I had no choice. Just hang on and wait for the end. It was hard work. It was the hardest work imaginable.”

— Charles Bukowski

141. “A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.”

— Charles Bukowski

142. “Are you becoming what you’ve always hated?”

— Charles Bukowski

143. “I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.”

— Charles Bukowski

144. “I think that the world should be full of cats and full of rain, that’s all, just cats and rain, rain and cats, very nice, good night.”

— Charles Bukowski

145. “Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don’t give a damn.”

— Charles Bukowski

146. “Insanity is relative. Who sets the norm?”

— Charles Bukowski

147. “If there are junk yards in hell, love is the dog that guards the gates.”

— Charles Bukowski

148. “Human relationships are strange. I mean, you are with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stops.”

— Charles Bukowski

149. “And don’t forget: time is meant to be wasted, love fails and death is useless.”

— Charles Bukowski

150. “I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but belief is a graveyard.”

— Charles Bukowski