Top 450 Charles Bukowski Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

306. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

312. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

314. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

317. “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

318. “I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.”

— Charles Bukowski

319. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

321. “I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

323. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

325. “As we live we all get caught and torn by various traps. Nobody escapes them. Some even live with them. The idea is to realize that a trap is a trap. If you are in one and you don’t realize it, then you’re finished.”

— Charles Bukowski

326. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

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

— 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. “Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.”

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

341. “I feel strangely normal.”

— Charles Bukowski

342. “No matter how little a man has he will find that he will always settle for less.”

— Charles Bukowski

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

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

— Charles Bukowski

347. “There would never be a way for me to live comfortably with people. Maybe I’d become a monk. I’d pretend to believe in God and live in a cubicle, play an organ and stay drunk on wine.”

— Charles Bukowski

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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