Quotes by
Charles Bukowski |
1920-1994 , American writer
German-born Amerixan author who wrote about the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. He wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over 60 books.
| 38 quotes | 2,372 visits |
Quotations
| • | Almost all poetry is a failure, because it sounds like somebody saying, Look, I have written a poem! 3 |
| • | Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must live. |
| • | What matters most is how well you walk through the fire. |
| • | My ambition is handicapped by laziness. |
| • | You have to die a few times before you can really live. |
| • | Find what you love and let it kill you. |
| • | If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose. |
| • | Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone. |
| • | Poetry is what happens when nothing else can. |
| • | Of course it’s possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well. |
| • | People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love. |
| • | I stopped looking for a dream girl, I just wanted one that wasn’t a nightmare. |
| • | Without literature, life is hell. |
| • | It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it. |
| • | And yet women –good women– frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep. |
| • | There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you. |
| • | I never met another man I'd rather be. And even if that's a delusion, it's a lucky one. |
| • | The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting. |
| • | Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It's like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss. |
| • | We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. |
| • | Beauty is nothing, beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it’s for something else. |
| • | The trouble with a mask is it never changes. |
| • | He asked, “What makes a man a writer?” “Well,” I said, “it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.” |
| • | If you have the ability to love, love yourself first. |
| • | Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers. |
| • | I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them. |
| • | People empty me. I have to get away to refill. |
| • | Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don’t give a damn. |
| • | The more crap you believe, the better off you are. |
| • | There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little. |
| • | People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they are sucking wind through bent straws. |
| • | When a hot woman meets a hermit, one of them is going to change. |
| • | What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman. |
| • | If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence. |
| • | Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and eight times out of nine I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities. |
| • | It began as a mistake. |
| • | Money is like sex. It seems much more important when you don't have any. |
| • | An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. |
