Top 450 Charles Bukowski Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “There is no hurry. Time means nothing to you.”

— Charles Bukowski

202. “We use such big words to move nowhere.”

— Charles Bukowski

203. “There’s no way I can stop writing, it’s a form of insanity.”

— Charles Bukowski

204. “The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.”

— Charles Bukowski

205. “It’s when you hide things that you choke on them.”

— Charles Bukowski

206. “People do too much. They say too much.”

— Charles Bukowski

207. “With me, my main vision for life was to avoid as many people as possible. The less people I saw the better I felt.”

— Charles Bukowski

208. “Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can’t even cry.”

— Charles Bukowski

209. “There’s nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death.”

— Charles Bukowski

210. “The years have gone by quickly. Death sits in the seat next to me. We make a lovely couple.”

— Charles Bukowski

211. “Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.”

— Charles Bukowski

212. “The wisest thing to do if you’re living in hell is to make yourself comfortable.”

— Charles Bukowski

213. “I’ve never met another man I’d rather be.”

— Charles Bukowski

214. “Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.”

— Charles Bukowski

215. “I walk into the kitchen, look at the typer down there on the floor. It’s a dirty floor. It’s a dirty typer that types dirty stories.”

— Charles Bukowski

216. “In New York you’ve got to have all the luck.”

— Charles Bukowski

217. “Love dries up, I thought as I walked back to the bathroom, even faster than sperm.”

— Charles Bukowski

218. “I don’t understand people, never will. It looks like I got to travel pretty much alone.”

— Charles Bukowski

219. “I’m going, she said. I love you but you’re crazy, you’re doomed.”

— Charles Bukowski

220. “The night kept coming on in and there was nothing I could do.”

— Charles Bukowski

221. “Pretty words, as pretty women, wrinkle up and die.”

— Charles Bukowski

222. “Well, the rain had stopped but the pain was still there.”

— Charles Bukowski

223. “It’s hot tonight and half the neighborhood is drunk. the other half is dead. if I have any advice about writing poetry it’s – don’t. I’m going to send out for some fried chicken.”

— Charles Bukowski

224. “Love is a form of prejudice. I have too many other prejudices.”

— Charles Bukowski

225. “This incompleteness is all we have.”

— Charles Bukowski

226. “Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same.”

— Charles Bukowski

227. “Bullfighting can be an art Boxing can be an art Loving can be an art Opening a can of sardines can be an art.”

— Charles Bukowski

228. “I always started a job with the feeling that I’d soon quit or be fired, and this gave ma a relaxex manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power.”

— Charles Bukowski

229. “I take much pleasure in being alone but there is also a strange warm grace in not being alone.”

— Charles Bukowski

230. “Alcohol is probably one of the greatest things to arrive upon the earth – alongside of me.”

— Charles Bukowski

231. “When you play the field selfishly everything works against you: one can’t insist on love or demand affection. you’re finally left with whatever you have been willing to give which often is: nothing.”

— Charles Bukowski

232. “I have a face like a washrag. I sing love songs and carry steel. I would rather die than cry. I can’t stand hounds can’t live without them. I hang my head against the white refrigerator and want to scream like the last weeping of life forever but I am bigger than the mountains.”

— Charles Bukowski

233. “There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.”

— Charles Bukowski

234. “The trouble with a mask is it never changes.”

— Charles Bukowski

235. “You’ve got to rise from the floor alone or fall back alone.”

— Charles Bukowski

236. “I only want sweet peace and kindliness when I awaken – but there’s always some finger pointing, telling me some terrible deed I committed during the night. It seems I make a lot of mistakes and it seems that I am not allowed any.”

— Charles Bukowski

237. “Don’t do it. Don’t love me.”

— Charles Bukowski

238. “Why do you insist upon destroying yourself?”

— Charles Bukowski

239. “It didn’t pay to trust another human being. Humans didn’t have it, whatever it took.”

— Charles Bukowski

240. “That’s when I first learned that it wasn’t enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.”

— Charles Bukowski

241. “There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.”

— Charles Bukowski

242. “I don’t think I’ll travel anymore. Travel is nothing but an inconvenience. There is always enough trouble where you are.”

— Charles Bukowski

243. “It was a joy! Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.”

— Charles Bukowski

244. “It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun.”

— Charles Bukowski

245. “I have two rules. One is, never trust a man who smokes a pipe. The other is, never trust a man with shiny shoes.”

— Charles Bukowski

246. “Finally there is nothing here for death to take away.”

— Charles Bukowski

247. “If I bet on humanity, I’d never cash a ticket.”

— Charles Bukowski

248. “I’ve learned to feel good when I feel good. it’s better to be driven around in a red porsche than to own one. the luck of the fool is inviolate.”

— Charles Bukowski

249. “I don’t like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.”

— Charles Bukowski

250. “Love is a horse with a broken leg trying to stand while 45,000 people watch.”

— Charles Bukowski