Top 450 Charles Bukowski Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “It’s when you hide things that you choke on them.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

211. “This incompleteness is all we have.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

213. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

215. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

217. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

225. “Sundays kill more people than bombs.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

235. “The human heart, as of course we all know is essentially good.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

238. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

240. “There still might be a place for us somewhere.”

— Charles Bukowski

241. “What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.”

— Charles Bukowski

242. “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

243. “News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

245. “The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left.”

— Charles Bukowski

246. “Sometimes a man doesn’t know what to do about things and sometimes it’s best to lie very still and try not to think at all about anything.”

— Charles Bukowski

247. “I wasn’t going anywhere and neither was the rest of the world. We were all just hanging around waiting to die and meanwhile doing little things to fill the space. Some of use weren’t even doing little things. We were vegetables.”

— Charles Bukowski

248. “I’m not the cruel type, but they are, and that’s the secret.”

— Charles Bukowski

249. “It’s so easy to be easy – if you let it.”

— Charles Bukowski

250. “I knew it would be you.”

— Charles Bukowski