Top 450 Charles Bukowski Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 10

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

253. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “I knew it would be you.”

— Charles Bukowski

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

265. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

277. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

280. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

282. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

290. “People don’t do me much good.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

294. “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

295. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

297. “You can forgive a fool because he only runs in one direction and doesn’t deceive anybody. It’s the deceivers who make you feel bad.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

299. “Oh, I don’t mean you’re handsome, not the way people think of handsome. Your face seems kind. But your eyes – they’re beautiful. They’re wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a forest on fire.”

— Charles Bukowski

300. “So, that’s what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That’s what they needed. People were fools. It was going to be easy for me.”

— Charles Bukowski