The Best Charles Bukowski quotes

Do you hate people? I don’t hate them…I just feel better when they’re not around. — Charles Bukowski

I feel strangely normal. — Charles Bukowski

How are his poems?’ ‘He’s not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way. — Charles Bukowski

There was something about that city, though it didn’t let me feel guilty that I had no feeling for the things so many others needed. it let me alone. — Charles Bukowski

The fuckers. There, I feel better. God–damned human race. There, I feel better. — Charles Bukowski

I was their bar freak, they needed me to make themselves feel better. just like, at times, I needed that graveyard. — Charles Bukowski

Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you’re feeling bad, just look at the cats, you’ll feel better, because they know that everything is, just as it is. — Charles Bukowski

And then there are some who believe that old relationships can be revived And made new again. but please if you feel that way don’t phone don’t write don’t arrive — Charles Bukowski

She slammed the door and was gone. I looked at the closed door and at the doorknob and strangely I didn’t feel alone. — Charles Bukowski

The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation. — Charles Bukowski

I’ve learned to feel good when I feel good. it’s better to be driven around in a red porsche than to own one. the luck of the fool is inviolate. — Charles Bukowski

People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love. — Charles Bukowski

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

How can you be true and kind at the same time? How? — Charles Bukowski

I am not a snob; it is simply that I am not interested with what most people have to say, or what they want to do–mostly with my time. — Charles Bukowski

She was desperate and she was choosey at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn’t have quite enough going for her to become what she imagined herself to be. — Charles Bukowski

There is no hurry. Time means nothing to you. — Charles Bukowski

Something that never happens anywhere at any time. — Charles Bukowski

I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them. — Charles Bukowski

This time has finished me. — Charles Bukowski

My youth, one time, that time I knew even through the nothingness, it was a celebration of something not to do but only know. — Charles Bukowski

The tired sunsets and The tired people–it takes a lifetime to die and no time at all. — Charles Bukowski

I’ll get back to the whores and the horses and the booze, while there’s time. — Charles Bukowski

Anything is a waste of time unless you are fucking well or creating well or getting well or looming toward a kind of phantom–love–happiness. — Charles Bukowski

You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics. — Charles Bukowski

What a weary time those years were––to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability. — Charles Bukowski

And don’t forget: time is meant to be wasted, love fails and death is useless. — Charles Bukowski

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. — Charles Bukowski

I didn’t feel that way about it. I had been playing with death for some time. I can’t say we were the best of friends but we were well acquainted. — Charles Bukowski

There is a time to stop reading, there is a time to STOP trying to WRITE, there is a time to kick the whole bloated sensation of ART out on its whore–ass. — Charles Bukowski

Trouble and pain were what kept a man alive. Or trying to avoid trouble and pain. It was a full time job. — Charles Bukowski

I guess we often get the deep blues, both of us, and wonder what it all means–the people, the buildings, the day by day things, the waste of time, of ourselves. — Charles Bukowski

Without literature, life is hell. — Charles Bukowski

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

And I said to myself that he was the first thing that I had ever missed in my life. — Charles Bukowski

Before my death I hope to obtain my life. — Charles Bukowski

Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live. — Charles Bukowski

There was nothing glorious about the life of a drinker or the life of a writer. — Charles Bukowski

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. — Charles Bukowski

They, all of them, seemed to put literary form in front of the actuality and living of life itself. — Charles Bukowski

It is possible to be truly mad and to still exist upon scraps of life. — Charles Bukowski

Life itself is not the miracle. that pain should be so constant, that’s the miracle– — Charles Bukowski

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. — Charles Bukowski

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself. — Charles Bukowski

It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it. — Charles Bukowski

I wasn’t lonely. I experienced no self–pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could find no meaning. — Charles Bukowski

It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun — Charles Bukowski

There is always somebody about to ruin your day, if not your life. — Charles Bukowski

Everything is so sweetly awful, so continuously sweetly awful: the art of consummation: life eating life. — Charles Bukowski

I’m fucking the grave, I thought, I’m bringing the dead back to life… — Charles Bukowski

They laughed. Things were funny. They weren’t afraid to care. There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. — Charles Bukowski

Being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right. — Charles Bukowski

Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone. — Charles Bukowski

To create art means to be crazy alone forever. — Charles Bukowski

I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get. — Charles Bukowski

I take much pleasure in being alone but there is also a strange warm grace in not being alone. — Charles Bukowski

Beware of those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone. — Charles Bukowski

I don’t understand people, never will. It looks like I got to travel pretty much alone. — Charles Bukowski

You’ve got to rise from the floor alone or fall back alone. — Charles Bukowski

The greatest men are the most alone. — Charles Bukowski

The writer has no responsibility other than to jack off in bed alone and write a good page. — Charles Bukowski

As a child i suppose i wAs not quite normal. my happiest times were when i wAs left alone in the house on a saturday. — Charles Bukowski

Four days alone with nothing. Emerge empowered. The first human face you see will knock you back 50%. — Charles Bukowski

I wanted the whole world or nothing. — Charles Bukowski

It’s a f*** you world. Well, keep it going anyhow, what the hell. — Charles Bukowski

The world had somehow gone too far, and spontaneous kindness could never be so easy. — Charles Bukowski

The world is full of boring, identical and mindless people. — Charles Bukowski

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid one are full of confidence’. — Charles Bukowski

When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat. — Charles Bukowski

I wasn’t much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing. — Charles Bukowski

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be? — Charles Bukowski

The whole world is caught in her glance and at last The universe is magnificent. — Charles Bukowski

I think that the world should be full of cats and full of rain, that’s all, just cats and rain, rain and cats, very nice, good night. — Charles Bukowski

I decided to stay in bed until noon. Maybe by then half the world would be dead and it would only be half as hard to take. — Charles Bukowski

The whole world is a sack of shit ripping open. I can´t save it. — Charles Bukowski

I was beaten down long ago in some alley in another world. — Charles Bukowski

My greatest problem was stamps, envelopes, paper and wine, with the world on the edge of World War II. — Charles Bukowski

My hands dead My heart dead silence adagio of rocks the world ablaze that’s the best for me. — Charles Bukowski

A woman has to have something on or there’s nothing to take off. — Charles Bukowski

You can do without a woman but not a typewriter. — Charles Bukowski

Gradually I came to realize that my understanding of women goes only as far as the pleasure is concerned. — Charles Bukowski

Many a good man has been put under the bridge by a woman. — Charles Bukowski

She knew what She wanted and it wasn’t / me. / I know more women like that than any / other kind. — Charles Bukowski

What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman. — Charles Bukowski

A woman is a full time job. You have to choose your profession. — Charles Bukowski

You can steal my women but don’t play with my whiskey. — Charles Bukowski

Modern women … they don’t sew your pockets … forget that. — Charles Bukowski

If you get married they think you’re finished and If you are without a woman they think you’re incomplete. — Charles Bukowski

Sweet Christ, you must know that a man will go further for any poem than for any woman ever born. — Charles Bukowski

A woman must be nursed into subsistence by love, where a man can become stronger by being hated. — From

Human relationships simply aren’t durable. I think back to the women in my life. they seem non–existent. — Charles Bukowski

Beautiful thoughts, and beautiful women never last. — Charles Bukowski

I have loved you woman as surely as I have named you rust and sand and nylon. — Charles Bukowski

I have been treated better than I should have been–––not by life in general nor by the machinery of things but by women. — Charles Bukowski

Pretty words, as pretty women, wrinkle up and die. — Charles Bukowski

Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love. — Charles Bukowski

Even the most horrible human being on earth deserves to wipe his ass. — Charles Bukowski

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. — Charles Bukowski

Mercy, I think, doesn’t the human race know anything about mercy? — Charles Bukowski

Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience. — Charles Bukowski

The human body is mostly blood and mystery and sadness. — Charles Bukowski

Nothing is worse than to finish a good shit, then reach over and find the toilet paper container empty. Even the most horrible human being on earth deserves to wipe his ass. — Charles Bukowski

I am ashamed to be a member of the human race but I don’t want to add any more to that shame, I want to scrape a little of it off. — Charles Bukowski

Even the stove and the refrigerator looked human, I mean good human–they seemed to have arms and voices and they said, hang around, kid, it’s good here, it can be very good here. — Charles Bukowski

There’s no way I can stop writing, it’s a form of insanity. — Charles Bukowski

If I stop writing I am dead. And that’s the only way I’ll stop: dead. — Charles Bukowski

Some moments are nice, Some are nicer, Some are even worth writing about. — Charles Bukowski

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life. — Charles Bukowski

Not writing is Not good but trying to write when you can’t is worse. — Charles Bukowski

I’m very clever at hiding poems perhaps more clever than I am at writing them. — Charles Bukowski

There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff’s edge. — Charles Bukowski

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. — Charles Bukowski

The public takes from a writer, or a writing, what it needs and lets the remainder go. but what they take is usually what they need least and what they let go is what they need most. — Charles Bukowski

Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity — Charles Bukowski

It’s hot tonight and half the neighborhood is drunk. the other half is dead. if I have any advice about writing poetry it’s–don’t. I’m going to send out for some fried chicken. — Charles Bukowski

Nothing can save you except writing. it keeps the walls from failing. — Charles Bukowski

A dry period for me means perhaps going two or three nights without writing. I probably have dry periods but I’m not aware of them and I go on writing, only the writing probably isn’t much good. — Charles Bukowski

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

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, ‘Don’t try.’ That fits the writing, too. I don’t try; I just type. — Charles Bukowski