Top 450 Charles Bukowski Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.”

— Charles Bukowski

302. “God is a lonely place without steak.”

— Charles Bukowski

303. “Her eyes always had a frantic, lost look. He could never cure her eyes of that.”

— Charles Bukowski

304. “Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them: like you they have not escaped.”

— Charles Bukowski

305. “I was beaten down long ago in some alley in another world.”

— Charles Bukowski

306. “I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.”

— Charles Bukowski

307. “When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.”

— Charles Bukowski

308. “I had decided against religion a couple of years back. If it were true, it made fools out of people, or it drew fools. And if it weren’t true, the fools were all the more foolish. What I need is a good doctor, I thought. You either lived or died.”

— Charles Bukowski

309. “The hangover was brutal but he didn’t mind. It told him he had been somewhere else, someplace good.”

— Charles Bukowski

310. “Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die.”

— Charles Bukowski

311. “I wasn’t sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren’t fools, they just didn’t fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering.”

— Charles Bukowski

312. “Dying in a a war never stopped wars from happening.”

— Charles Bukowski

313. “I hope that death contains less than this.”

— Charles Bukowski

314. “A woman is a full time job. You have to choose your profession.”

— Charles Bukowski

315. “But my whole life has been a matter of fighting for one simple hour to do what I want to do. There was always something getting in the way of my getting to myself.”

— Charles Bukowski

316. “What’s genius? I don’t know but I do know that the difference between a madman and a professional is that a pro does as well as he can within what he has set out to do and a madman does exceptionally well at what he can’t help doing.”

— Charles Bukowski

317. “Knowledge is knowing as little as possible.”

— Charles Bukowski

318. “Well, people got attatched. Once you cut the umbilical cord they attatched to the other things. Sight, sound, sex, money, mirages, mothers, masturbation, murder, and Monday morning hangovers.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

320. “Do some living and get yourself a typewriter.”

— Charles Bukowski

321. “I have seen too many men wilt and go silly under a little light, and then they continue to write and get published, turning out pure crap under a name that has become a bad habit. The next poem is all that counts. You can’t stand on past poems.”

— Charles Bukowski

322. “Basically, that’s why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.”

— Charles Bukowski

323. “It seems I make a lot of mistakes and it seems that I am not allowed any.”

— Charles Bukowski

324. “I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.”

— Charles Bukowski

325. “When a writer is swayed with his fame and his fortune, you can float him down the river with the turds.”

— Charles Bukowski

326. “We waste days like mad blackbirds and pray for alcoholic nightsour silk-sick human smiles wrap around us like somebody else’s confetti.”

— Charles Bukowski

327. “We’ve died so many times now that we can only wonder why we still care.”

— Charles Bukowski

328. “I went to the bathroom and threw some water on my face, combed my hair. If I could only comb that face, I thought, but I can’t.”

— Charles Bukowski

329. “I would be married, but I’d have no wife, I would be married to a single life.”

— Charles Bukowski

330. “I feel strangely normal.”

— Charles Bukowski

331. “There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on.”

— Charles Bukowski

332. “Some men hope for revolution but when you revolt and set up your new government you find your new government is still the same old Papa, he has only put on a cardboard mask.”

— Charles Bukowski

333. “You just rebel against everything. How are you going to survive? I don’t know. I’m already tired.”

— Charles Bukowski

334. “Why do we embroider everything we say with special emphasis when all we really need to do is simply say what needs to he said? Of course the fact is that there is very little that needs to be said.”

— Charles Bukowski

335. “I am a dolt of a man, easily made happy or even stupidly happy almost without cause and left alone I am mostly content.”

— Charles Bukowski

336. “Learn, he says, that there will be hours, days and months ahead of feeling absolutely terrible and nothing can change that; neither new girlfriends, health professionals, changes of diet, dope, humility, or God.”

— Charles Bukowski

337. “It is possible to be truly mad and to still exist upon scraps of life.”

— Charles Bukowski

338. “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

339. “Hemingway and Saroyan had the line, the magic of it. The problem was that Hemingway didn’t know how to laugh and Saroyan was filled with sugar.”

— Charles Bukowski

340. “You don’t go on “probably” when love and guns are in hand.”

— Charles Bukowski

341. “I think that everything should be made available to everybody, and I mean LSD, cocaine, codeine, grass, opium, the works. Nothing on earth available to any man should be confiscated and made unlawful by other men in more seemingly powerful and advantageous positions.”

— Charles Bukowski

342. “I can see where creation often stops while the body still lives and often does not care to. the death of life before life dies.”

— Charles Bukowski

343. “To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you’re frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.”

— Charles Bukowski

344. “I was fairly poor but most of my money went for wine and classical music. I loved to mix the two together.”

— Charles Bukowski

345. “People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.”

— Charles Bukowski

346. “An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.”

— Charles Bukowski

347. “We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men’s crapper of the local bar.”

— Charles Bukowski

348. “There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff’s edge.”

— Charles Bukowski

349. “I was only photographing in words the reality of it all.”

— Charles Bukowski

350. “I seldom know what I’m going to write when I sit down. There isn’t much agony and sweat of the human spirit involved in doing it. The writing’s easy, it’s the living that is sometimes difficult.”

— Charles Bukowski