Top 450 Charles Bukowski Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “I am for the small man who has not forgotten, for the man who loves his beer and his women and his sunlight.”

— Charles Bukowski

402. “I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife inside because there was no alternative except to hide as long as possible – not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance: trying to connect.”

— Charles Bukowski

403. “My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.”

— Charles Bukowski

404. “I got up and walked back to my roominghouse. The moonlight was bright. My footsteps echoed in the empty street and it sounded as if somebody was following me, I looked around. I was mistaken. I was quite alone.”

— Charles Bukowski

405. “Never trust a man in a jumpsuit.”

— Charles Bukowski

406. “I could never accept life as it was, I could never gobble down all its poisons bu there were parts, tenuous magic parts open for the asking.”

— Charles Bukowski

407. “A man who can beat the horses can do anything he makes up his mind to do.”

— Charles Bukowski

408. “It’s hard to drink when you dance. And it’s hard to dance when you drink.”

— Charles Bukowski

409. “I held her wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred, centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted. there was no creature living as foul as I and all my poems were false.”

— Charles Bukowski

410. “The blankets had fallen off and I stared down at her white back, the shoulder blades sticking out as if they wanted to grow into wings, poke through that skin. Little blades. She was helpless.”

— Charles Bukowski

411. “I can’t blame her. but wonder why she’s here with me? where are the other guys? how can you be lucky? having someone the others have abandoned?”

— Charles Bukowski

412. “When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble.”

— Charles Bukowski

413. “And I said to myself that he was the first thing that I had ever missed in my life.”

— Charles Bukowski

414. “God knows I am not too hippy. Perhaps because I am too much around the hip and I fear fads for, like anybody else, I like something that tends to last.”

— Charles Bukowski

415. “Courts are places where the ending is written first and all that precedes is simply vaudeville.”

— Charles Bukowski

416. “I am too sick to lay down the sidewalks frighten me the whole damned city frightens me, what I will become what I have become frightens me.”

— Charles Bukowski

417. “It was sad, it was sad, it was sad. When Betty came back we didn’t sing or laugh, or even argue. We sat drinking in the dark, smoking cigarettes, and when we went to sleep, I didn’t put my feet on her body or she on mine like we used to. We slept without touching. We had both been robbed.”

— Charles Bukowski

418. “When I’m drinking around people, I tend to get silly or pugnacious or wild, which can cause problems.”

— Charles Bukowski

419. “Some nights I knew that if I slept I would die.”

— Charles Bukowski

420. “Forgive me, I guess I am off in the head, but I mean, except for a quickie piece of ass it wouldn’t matter to me if all the people in the world died. Yes, I know it’s not nice. But I’d be as contended as a snail; it was, after all, the people who had made me unhappy.”

— Charles Bukowski

421. “I hated you when it would have taken less courage to love.”

— Charles Bukowski

422. “If I hadn’t been a drunkard, I probably would have committed suicide long ago.”

— Charles Bukowski

423. “Getting drunk was good. I decided that I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious and maybe if you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn’t become so obvious yourself.”

— Charles Bukowski

424. “Her one drink had Cecelia giggling and talking and she was explaining that animals had souls too. Nobody challenged her opinion. It was possible, we knew. What we weren’t sure of was if we had any.”

— Charles Bukowski

425. “Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.”

— Charles Bukowski

426. “I was a bore and didn’t know when to smile or fake it. Or rather worse, I did but didn’t.”

— Charles Bukowski

427. “My body gnaws at me from one side and my spirit gnaws at me from the other.”

— Charles Bukowski

428. “Fiction is an improvement on life.”

— Charles Bukowski

429. “And there I was, 225 pounds, perpetually lost and confused, short legs, ape-like upper body, all chest, no neck, head too large, blurred eyes, hair uncombed, 6 feet of geek, waiting for her.”

— Charles Bukowski

430. “Dying should come easy: like a freight train you don’t hear when your back is turned.”

— Charles Bukowski

431. “If you can only remain pure in your stupidity, someday you may get a phone call from hell.”

— Charles Bukowski

432. “I don’t remember going to bed, but in the morning, there I was.”

— Charles Bukowski

433. “Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience.”

— Charles Bukowski

434. “We are here to laugh at the odds.”

— Charles Bukowski

435. “Complaint is often the result of an insufficient ability to live within the obvious restrictions of this god damned cage.”

— Charles Bukowski

436. “Angels, we have grown apart.”

— Charles Bukowski

437. “I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future.”

— Charles Bukowski

438. “It seemed better to delay thinking.”

— Charles Bukowski

439. “There’s nothing else as pleasant as being unpleasant when there’s nothing else to do, and there’s usually nothing else to do.”

— Charles Bukowski

440. “Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.”

— Charles Bukowski

441. “If you want to create, you’ll create...”

— Charles Bukowski

442. “Gradually I came to realize that my understanding of women goes only as far as the pleasure is concerned.”

— Charles Bukowski

443. “I never pump up my vulgarity. I wait for it to arrive in its own terms.”

— Charles Bukowski

444. “We are hardly ever as strong as that which we create.”

— Charles Bukowski

445. “Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer.”

— Charles Bukowski

446. “Writers are nothing but beggars with a good line.”

— Charles Bukowski

447. “I pretend to understand because I don’t want anybody to be hurt.”

— Charles Bukowski

448. “I write as a function. Without it I would fall ill and die. It’s as much a part of one as the liver or intestine, and just about as glamorous.”

— Charles Bukowski

449. “I mean, say that you figure that everything is senseless, then it can’t be quite senseless because you are aware that it’s senseless and your awareness of senselessness almost gives it sense. You know what I mean?”

— Charles Bukowski

450. “Some people have written that my writing has helped them go on. It has helped me too. The writing, the roses, the 9 cats.”

— Charles Bukowski