Top 450 Charles Bukowski Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The human heart, as of course we all know is essentially good.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

253. “Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life.”

— Charles Bukowski

254. “People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they are sucking wind through bent straws.”

— Charles Bukowski

255. “Careful poetry and careful people live only long enough to die safely.”

— Charles Bukowski

256. “The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

258. “People were interesting at first. Then later, slowly but surely, all the flaws and madness would manifest themselves. I would become less and less to them; they would mean less and less to me.”

— Charles Bukowski

259. “I knew exactly what I was doing: I was doing nothing. because I knew there was nothing to do.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

261. “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

262. “I suppose like others I have come through fire and sword, love gone wrong, head-on crashes, drunk at sea, and I have listened to the simple sound of water running in tubs and wished to drown.”

— Charles Bukowski

263. “I knew it would be you.”

— Charles Bukowski

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

268. “If I’m an ass, I should say so. If I don’t, somebody else will. If I say it first, that disarms them.”

— Charles Bukowski

269. “I just let it roll. Like a hot turd down a hill.”

— Charles Bukowski

270. “I wish I were driving a blue 1952 Buick or a dark blue 1942 Buick or a blue 1932 Buick over a cliff of hell and into the sea.”

— Charles Bukowski

271. “There’s nothing unusual about love.”

— Charles Bukowski

272. “Writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and afterwards she gets up, goes to her purse and gives me a handful of money.”

— Charles Bukowski

273. “Dear child, I only did to you what the sparrow did to you; I am old when it is fashionable to be young; I cry when it is fashionable to laugh. I hated you when it would have taken less courage to love.”

— Charles Bukowski

274. “Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I’ve had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I’m not writing than when I am.”

— Charles Bukowski

275. “The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even during the day with covers pulled up to my chin. It was good in there, nothing ever occurred in there, no people, nothing.”

— Charles Bukowski

276. “You have my soul and I have your money.”

— Charles Bukowski

277. “I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. It didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.”

— Charles Bukowski

278. “She was desperate and she was choosey at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn’t have quite enough going for her to become what she imagined herself to be.”

— Charles Bukowski

279. “LSD, yeah, the big parade – everybody’s doin’ it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me.”

— Charles Bukowski

280. “I was glad I wasn’t in love, that I wasn’t happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective. They lose their sense of humor. They become nervous, psychotic bores. They even become killers.”

— Charles Bukowski

281. “I like the way Mahler wandered about in his music and still retained his passion. He must have looked like an earthquake walking down the street.”

— Charles Bukowski

282. “Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I’ve got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought.”

— Charles Bukowski

283. “Before you kill something make sure you have something better to replace it with...”

— Charles Bukowski

284. “My flesh looked like it wasn’t trying. It looked like it hated being part of me.”

— Charles Bukowski

285. “One more drink and you’re dead. This is no way to talk to a suicide head.”

— Charles Bukowski

286. “It was better for me when I could imagine greatness in others, even if it wasn’t always there.”

— Charles Bukowski

287. “More often than not Democratic Law works to the advantage of the few even though the many have voted; this, of course, is because the few have told them how to vote.”

— Charles Bukowski

288. “You were destroyed by what you befriended.”

— Charles Bukowski

289. “You can steal my women but don’t play with my whiskey.”

— Charles Bukowski

290. “Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.”

— Charles Bukowski

291. “But she projected vitality – you knew that she was there.”

— Charles Bukowski

292. “I will put on my shoes and shirt and get out of here – it’ll be better for all of us.”

— Charles Bukowski

293. “When Ginsburg is at the top of his game you might as well put down your toys and listen.”

— Charles Bukowski

294. “People don’t do me much good.”

— Charles Bukowski

295. “I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get.”

— Charles Bukowski

296. “I got lost somehow, began staring up her legs. I was always a leg man. It was the first thing I saw when I was born. But then I was trying to get out. Ever since I have been working in the other direction and with pretty lousy luck.”

— Charles Bukowski

297. “Sometimes I feel as if we are all trapped in a movie. We know our lines, where to walk, how to act, only there is no camera. Yet, we can’t break out of the movie. And it’s a bad one.”

— Charles Bukowski

298. “Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I’ll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.”

— Charles Bukowski

299. “Animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. Neither do I. Maybe that’s why we get along.”

— Charles Bukowski

300. “That’s what friendship is, sharing the prejudice of experience.”

— Charles Bukowski