Charles Bukowski Quotes

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

Find what you love and let it kill you.

Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you’re feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you’ll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There’s nothing to get excited about. They just know. They’re saviours.

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

Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don’t give a damn.

In my next life I want to be a cat. To sleep 20 hours a day and wait to be fed. To sit around licking my ass.

The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it, there is not one who will resist.

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.

Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.

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.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don’t want it smoothed out.

I don’t like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas.

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.