Top 450 Charles Bukowski Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.”

— Charles Bukowski

152. “I would certainly end up forever crying the blues into a coffee cup in a park for old men playing chess or silly games of some sort.”

— Charles Bukowski

153. “When a hot woman meets a hermit one of them is going to change.”

— Charles Bukowski

154. “Almost everyone is born a genius and buried an idiot.”

— Charles Bukowski

155. “Let’ em learn or let’ em die.”

— Charles Bukowski

156. “I enjoy the bad things that are said about me. It enhances sales and makes me feel evil. I don’t like to feel good ’cause I am good. But evil? Yes. It gives me another dimension.”

— Charles Bukowski

157. “Death is nothing, brother, it’s life that’s hard.”

— Charles Bukowski

158. “I wasn’t a misanthrope and I wasn’t a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.”

— Charles Bukowski

159. “The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.”

— Charles Bukowski

160. “New Year’s Eve always terrifies me.”

— Charles Bukowski

161. “Sexual intercourse is kicking death in the ass while singing.”

— Charles Bukowski

162. “I will remember the kisses, our lips raw with love, and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me.”

— Charles Bukowski

163. “There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock. People so tired, mutilated either by love or no love.”

— Charles Bukowski

164. “True revolution comes from true revulsion; when things get bad enough the kitten will kill the lion.”

— Charles Bukowski

165. “It’s nice enough to make a man weep, but I don’t weep, do you?”

— Charles Bukowski

166. “Cautiously, I allowed myself to feel good at times. I found moments of peace in cheap rooms just staring at the knobs of some dresser or listening to the rain in the dark. The less I needed the better I felt.”

— Charles Bukowski

167. “I have gotten so used to melancholia that I greet it like an old friend.”

— Charles Bukowski

168. “Things will be far worse than they are now. And far better. I wait.”

— Charles Bukowski

169. “What a weary time those years were – to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.”

— Charles Bukowski

170. “I am a series of small victories and large defeats.”

— Charles Bukowski

171. “I heard an airplane passing overhead. I wished I was on it.”

— Charles Bukowski

172. “Maybe when I get in the grave, things will be beautiful.”

— Charles Bukowski

173. “We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus!”

— Charles Bukowski

174. “Long before I became ‘rich and famous’ I just sat round drinking wine and staring at the walls.”

— Charles Bukowski

175. “The fuckers. There, I feel better. God-damned human race. There, I feel better.”

— Charles Bukowski

176. “Sundays kill more people than bombs.”

— Charles Bukowski

177. “The trouble with these people is that their cities have never been bombed and their mothers have never been told to shut up.”

— Charles Bukowski

178. “I never felt right being alone; sometimes it felt good but it never felt right.”

— Charles Bukowski

179. “There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.”

— Charles Bukowski

180. “I knew I was strong, and maybe like they said, “crazy.” But I had this feeling inside of me that something real was there.”

— Charles Bukowski

181. “An early taste of death is not necessarily a bad thing.”

— Charles Bukowski

182. “Knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge.”

— Charles Bukowski

183. “I don’t know about other people, but when I wake up in the morning and put my shoes on, I think, Jesus Christ, now what?”

— Charles Bukowski

184. “Drinking is another way of thinking, another way of living. It gives you two lives instead of one.”

— Charles Bukowski

185. “I was in love again. I was in trouble.”

— Charles Bukowski

186. “People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective.”

— Charles Bukowski

187. “In a capitalistic society the losers slaved for the winners and you have to have more losers than winners.”

— Charles Bukowski

188. “Don’t wait for the good woman. She doesn’t exist.”

— Charles Bukowski

189. “Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you’ll never meet them.”

— Charles Bukowski

190. “In my next life I want to be a cat. To sleep 20 hours a day and wait to be fed. To sit around licking my ass.”

— Charles Bukowski

191. “Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing.”

— Charles Bukowski

192. “The crazy ones only laugh when there is no reason to laugh.”

— Charles Bukowski

193. “It will rain all this night and we will sleep transfixed by the dark water as our blood runs through our fragile life.”

— Charles Bukowski

194. “I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.”

— Charles Bukowski

195. “I had no Freedom. I had nothing.”

— Charles Bukowski

196. “I met a genius on the train today about 6 years old, he sat beside me and as the train ran down along the coast we came to the ocean and then he looked at me and said, it’s not pretty.”

— Charles Bukowski

197. “Never get out of bed before noon.”

— Charles Bukowski

198. “Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.”

— Charles Bukowski

199. “My part of the game is that I must live the best I can.”

— Charles Bukowski

200. “Food is good for the nerves and the spirit. Courage comes from the belly – all else is desperation.”

— Charles Bukowski