CHARLES BUKOWSKI QUOTES II
American poet & novelist (1920-1994)
I never write in the daytime. It's like running through the shopping mall with your clothes off. Everybody can see you. At night ... that's when you pull the tricks ... magic.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Interview Magazine, September 1987
I enjoy the bad things that are said about me. It enhances sales and makes me feel evil. I don't like to feel good 'cause I am good. But evil? Yes. It gives me another dimension.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Interview Magazine, September 1987
My ambition is handicapped by my laziness.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Factotum
You have to die a few times before you can really live.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
The People Look Like Flowers at Last
The difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
The difference between a brave man and a coward is a coward thinks twice before jumping in the cage with a lion. The brave man doesn't know what a lion is. He just thinks he does.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stonewritten. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Life Magazine, December 1988
That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Women
I call 'em complaining machines. Things are never right with a guy to them. And man, when you throw that hysteria in there...forget it. I gotta get out, get in the car, and go. Anywhere. Get a cup of coffee somewhere. Anywhere. Anything but another woman. I guess they're just built different, right?
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Interview Magazine, September 1987
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 saviors. The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you'll live ten times longer than if you have ten. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It's truly ridiculous.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Interview Magazine, September 1987
There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives ... their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.... Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Women
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.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Tales of Ordinary Madness
Modern women ... they don't sew your pockets ... forget that.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Interview Magazine, September 1987
If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Ham on Rye
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
Factotum
Bullfighting can be an art
Boxing can be an art
Loving can be an art
Opening a can of sardines can be an art
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
New York Quarterly, 1985
Many a good man has been put under the bridge by a woman.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Women
It's all overrated, man. Sex is only a great thing if you're not getting any.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Interview Magazine, September 1987