All Time Famous Charles Bukowski Quotes

Henry Charles Bukowski (/buːˈkaʊski/boo-KOW-see; born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, German: [ˈhaɪnʁɪç ˈkaʁl buˈkɔfski]; August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambiance of his adopted home city of Los Angeles. Bukowski’s work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. The FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column Notes of a Dirty Old Man in the LA underground newspaper Open City.

Bukowski published extensively in small literary magazines and with small presses beginning in the early 1940s and continuing on through the early 1990s. He wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories, and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books during the course of his career. Some of these works include his Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window, published by his friend and fellow poet Charles Potts, and better-known works such as Burning in Water, and Drowning in Flame. These poems and stories were later republished by John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press (now HarperCollins/Ecco Press) as collected volumes of his work. As noted by one reviewer, “Bukowski continued to be, thanks to his antics and deliberate clownish performances, the king of the underground and the epitome of the littles in the ensuing decades, stressing his loyalty to those small press editors who had first championed his work and consolidating his presence in new ventures such as the New York Quarterly, Chiron Review, or Slipstream.”

In 1986, Time called Bukowski a “laureate of American lowlife”. Regarding his enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, “The secret of Bukowski’s appeal … [is that] he combines the confessional poet’s promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.” During his lifetime, Bukowski received little attention from academic critics in the United States, but was better received in Europe, particularly the UK, and especially Germany, where he was born. Since his death in March 1994, Bukowski has been the subject of a number of critical articles and books about both his life and writings.

Charles Bukowski Quotes

1. “Find what you love and let it kill you.”
— Charles Bukowski

2. “If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.”
— Charles Bukowski

3. “Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
— Charles Bukowski

4. “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
— Charles Bukowski

5. “Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.”
— Charles Bukowski

6. “If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”
— Charles Bukowski

7. “Life’s as kind as you let it be.”
— Charles Bukowski

8. “You have to die a few times before you can really live.”
— Charles Bukowski

9. “Without literature, life is hell.”
— Charles Bukowski

10. “An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
— Charles Bukowski

11. “I don’t hate people. I just feel better when they aren’t around.”
— Charles Bukowski

12. “I have no time for things that have no soul.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

14. “If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.”
— Charles Bukowski

15. “If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.”
— Charles Bukowski

16. “Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside – remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.”
— Charles Bukowski

17. “Wherever the crowd goes run in the other direction. They’re always wrong.”
— Charles Bukowski

18. “The less I needed, the better I felt.”
— Charles Bukowski

19. “Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself.”
— Charles Bukowski

20. “We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.”
— Charles Bukowski

21. “Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.”
— Charles Bukowski

22. “Nothing can save you except writing. It keeps the walls from failing.”
— Charles Bukowski

23. “We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
— Charles Bukowski

24. “Drink from the well of yourself and begin again.”
— Charles Bukowski

25. “Don’t fight your demons. Your demons are here to teach you lessons. Sit down with your demons and have a drink and a chat and learn their names and talk about the burns on their fingers and scratches on their ankles. Some of them are very nice.”
— Charles Bukowski

26. “I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
— Charles Bukowski

27. “We don’t even ask for happiness, just a little less pain.”
— Charles Bukowski

28. “I have one problem, I don’t hate people. They disgust me and I want to get away from them. I do not have hatred. I have an escape mechanism.”
— Charles Bukowski

29. “People empty me. I have to get away to refill.”
— Charles Bukowski

30. “You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. And the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. Your life is your life. Know it while you have it.”
— Charles Bukowski

31. “There’s a light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

33. “I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn’t a nightmare.”
— Charles Bukowski

34. “If you’re going to try, go all the way. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs, and maybe your mind.”
— Charles Bukowski

35. “If you let them kill you, they will.”
— Charles Bukowski

36. “Baby,” I said, “I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me.”
— Charles Bukowski

37. “Only the boring get bored.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

39. “If you are going to try, go all the way or don’t even start. If you follow it you will be alive with the gods. It is the only good fight there is.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

41. “My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

43. “The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it.”
— Charles Bukowski

44. “Those who escape hell however never talk about it and nothing much bothers them after that.”
— Charles Bukowski

45. “My ambition is handicapped by laziness.”
— Charles Bukowski

46. “Love breaks my bones and I laugh.”
— Charles Bukowski

47. “I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it, I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude, but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.”
— Charles Bukowski

48. “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

49. “The empty, the angry, the lonely, the tricked, we are all museums of fear.”
— Charles Bukowski

50. “The courage it took to get out of bed each morning to face the same things over and over was enormous.”
— Charles Bukowski

51. “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

52. “I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad when you can’t feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”
— Charles Bukowski

53. “The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest; true creation is a solitary act.”
— Charles Bukowski

54. “I’ve had so many knives stuck into me, when they hand me a flower I can’t quite make out what it is. It takes time.”
— Charles Bukowski

55. “There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out.”
— Charles Bukowski

56. “It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.”
— Charles Bukowski

57. “Let it die. Let there be a new beginning. It’s awful. Goodnight.”
— Charles Bukowski

58. “Death is not the problem; waiting around for it is.”
— Charles Bukowski

59. “If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.”
— Charles Bukowski

60. “The area dividing the brain and the soul Is affected in many ways by experience – Some lose all mind and become soul: insane. Some lose all souls and become mind: intellectual. Some lose both and become: accepted.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

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

63. “If I never see you again I will always carry you inside outside on my fingertips and at brain edges and in centers of what I am of what remains.”
— Charles Bukowski

64. “There is a place in the heart that will never be filled; a space. And even during the best moments, and the greatest times, we will know it.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

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

67. “There’s music in everything, even defeat.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

69. “We are all museums of fear.”
— Charles Bukowski

70. “Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.”
— Charles Bukowski

71. “The secret is writing down one simple line after another.”
— Charles Bukowski

72. “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.”
— Charles Bukowski

73. “And yet women – frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.”
— Charles Bukowski

74. “I am a poem. There is no way out.”
— Charles Bukowski

75. “I no longer want it all, just some comfort and some sex and some minor love.”
— Charles Bukowski

76. “Why did I come here? I thought. Why is it always only a matter of choosing between something bad and something worse?”
— Charles Bukowski

77. “I want to let her know though that all the nights sleeping beside her even the useless arguments were things ever splendid and the hard words I ever feared to say can now be said: I love you.”
— Charles Bukowski

78. “Don’t wait for the good woman. She doesn’t exist. There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd.”
— Charles Bukowski

79. “That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man.”
— Charles Bukowski

80. “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

81. “Lighting new cigarettes, pouring more drinks. It has been a beautiful fight. Still is.”
— Charles Bukowski

82. “A spark can set a whole forest on fire. Just a spark. Save it.”
— Charles Bukowski

83. “I never met another man I’d rather be. And even if that’s a delusion, it’s a lucky one.”
— Charles Bukowski

84. “Existence was not only absurd, it was plain hard work. Think of how many times you put on your underwear in a lifetime. It was appalling, it was disgusting, it was stupid.”
— Charles Bukowski

85. “Look, let me put it this way: with me, you’re number one and there isn’t even a number two.”
— Charles Bukowski

86. “I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.”
— Charles Bukowski

87. “There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you.”
— Charles Bukowski

88. “People don’t need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn’t be.”
— Charles Bukowski

89. “Bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything well.”
— Charles Bukowski

90. “Those who preach god, need god Those who preach peace do not have peace Those who preach love do not have love.”
— Charles Bukowski

91. “Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”
— Charles Bukowski

92. “Lawyers, doctors, plumbers, they all made the money. Writers? Writers starved. Writers suicided. Writers went mad.”
— Charles Bukowski

93. “I can almost understand why people leap from bridges.”
— Charles Bukowski

94. “I’m too careless. I don’t put out enough effort. I’m tired.”
— Charles Bukowski

95. “Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit.”
— Charles Bukowski

96. “Each man’s hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind my ruined face.”
— Charles Bukowski

97. “Humanity, you never had it to begin with.”
— Charles Bukowski

98. “I’ve never been lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have. Let’s drink more wine!”
— Charles Bukowski

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

100. “People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.”
— Charles Bukowski

101. “Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem.”
— Charles Bukowski

102. “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

103. “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”
— Charles Bukowski

104. “It’s not so much that nothing means anything but more that it keeps meaning nothing. there’s no release, just gurus and self-appointed gods and hucksters. the more people say, the less there is to say. even the best books are dry sawdust.”
— Charles Bukowski

105. “If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it.”
— Charles Bukowski

106. “All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was always controlling who got a chance and who didn’t.”
— Charles Bukowski

107. “They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work.”
— Charles Bukowski

108. “Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.”
— Charles Bukowski

109. “For each Joan of Arc, there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter.”
— Charles Bukowski

110. “Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
— Charles Bukowski

111. “Love is a Dog from Hell.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

113. “Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing. To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.”
— Charles Bukowski

114. “I read my books at night, like that, under the quilt with the overheated reading lamp. Reading all those good lines while suffocating. It was magic.”
— Charles Bukowski

115. “It began as a mistake.”
— Charles Bukowski

116. “To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.”
— Charles Bukowski

117. “I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here.”
— Charles Bukowski

118. “I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”
— Charles Bukowski

119. “If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.”
— Charles Bukowski

120. “Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others.”
— Charles Bukowski

121. “I write right off the typer. I call it my “machine gun.” I hit it hard, usually late at night while drinking wine and listening to classical music on the radio and smoking mangalore ganesh beedies.”
— Charles Bukowski

122. “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

123. “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.”
— Charles Bukowski

124. “That’s how it is with books, isn’t it: They’re not in a hurry. They’ll wait for you till you’re ready. People empty me. I have to go away to refill.”
— Charles Bukowski

125. “The more crap you believe, the better off you are.”
— Charles Bukowski

126. “If you can’t write the next line, well, you’re dead. The past doesn’t matter.”
— Charles Bukowski

127. “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

128. “The Difference Between Art and Life is that Art is More Bearable.”
— Charles Bukowski

129. “I didn’t have any friends at school, didn’t want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to me.”
— Charles Bukowski

130. “To be young is the only religion.”
— Charles Bukowski

131. “Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.”
— Charles Bukowski

132. “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

133. “The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life to a function that doesn’t interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative.”
— Charles Bukowski

134. “Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.”
— Charles Bukowski

135. “There is nothing as boring as the truth.”
— Charles Bukowski

136. “Are you becoming what you’ve always hated?”
— Charles Bukowski

137. “I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.”
— Charles Bukowski

138. “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

139. “Insanity is relative. Who sets the norm?”
— Charles Bukowski

140. “If there are junk yards in hell, love is the dog that guards the gates.”
— Charles Bukowski

141. “They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.”
— Charles Bukowski

142. “Keep your money in your pocket. Or bet it on a good horse.”
— Charles Bukowski

143. “Human relationships are strange. I mean, you are with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stops.”
— Charles Bukowski

144. “It’s 4:30 in the morning, it’s always 4:30 in the morning.”
— Charles Bukowski

145. “Most of the world was mad. And the part that wasn’t mad was angry. And the part that wasn’t mad or angry was just stupid. I had no chance. I had no choice. Just hang on and wait for the end. It was hard work. It was the hardest work imaginable.”
— Charles Bukowski

146. “I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but belief is a graveyard.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

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

149. “A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.”
— Charles Bukowski

150. “I would certainly end up forever crying the blues into a coffee cup in a park for old men playing chess or silly games of some sort.”
— Charles Bukowski

151. “When a hot woman meets a hermit one of them is going to change.”
— Charles Bukowski

152. “Almost everyone is born a genius and buried an idiot.”
— Charles Bukowski

153. “Let’ em learn or let’ em die.”
— Charles Bukowski

154. “I wasn’t a misanthrope and I wasn’t a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.”
— Charles Bukowski

155. “The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.”
— Charles Bukowski

156. “New Year’s Eve always terrifies me.”
— Charles Bukowski

157. “Sexual intercourse is kicking death in the ass while singing.”
— Charles Bukowski

158. “I will remember the kisses, our lips raw with love, and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me.”
— Charles Bukowski

159. “True revolution comes from true revulsion; when things get bad enough the kitten will kill the lion.”
— Charles Bukowski

160. “Things will be far worse than they are now. And far better. I wait.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

162. “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

163. “Death is nothing, brother, it’s life that’s hard.”
— Charles Bukowski

164. “I am a series of small victories and large defeats.”
— Charles Bukowski

165. “Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don’t give a damn.”
— Charles Bukowski

166. “I heard an airplane passing overhead. I wished I was on it.”
— Charles Bukowski

167. “Maybe when I get in the grave, things will be beautiful.”
— Charles Bukowski

168. “We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus!”
— Charles Bukowski

169. “Long before I became ‘rich and famous’ I just sat around drinking wine and staring at the walls.”
— Charles Bukowski

170. “The fuckers. There, I feel better. God-damned human race. There, I feel better.”
— Charles Bukowski

171. “The trouble with these people is that their cities have never been bombed and their mothers have never been told to shut up.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

173. “There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.”
— Charles Bukowski

174. “I never felt right being alone; sometimes it felt good but it never felt right.”
— Charles Bukowski

175. “I knew I was strong, and maybe like they said, “crazy.” But I had this feeling inside of me that something real was there.”
— Charles Bukowski

176. “Knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge.”
— Charles Bukowski

177. “An early taste of death is not necessarily a bad thing.”
— Charles Bukowski

178. “I don’t know about other people, but when I wake up in the morning and put my shoes on, I think, Jesus Christ, now what?”
— Charles Bukowski

179. “Drinking is another way of thinking, another way of living. It gives you two lives instead of one.”
— Charles Bukowski

180. “It’s nice enough to make a man weep, but I don’t weep, do you?”
— Charles Bukowski

181. “There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock. People so tired, mutilated either by love or no love.”
— Charles Bukowski

182. “People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective.”
— Charles Bukowski

183. “Don’t wait for the good woman. She doesn’t exist.”
— Charles Bukowski

184. “I have gotten so used to melancholia that I greet it like an old friend.”
— Charles Bukowski

185. “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.”
— Charles Bukowski

186. “Cautiously, I allowed myself to feel good at times. I found moments of peace in cheap rooms just staring at the knobs of some dresser or listening to the rain in the dark. The less I needed the better I felt.”
— Charles Bukowski

187. “Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing.”
— Charles Bukowski

188. “The crazy ones only laugh when there is no reason to laugh.”
— Charles Bukowski

189. “Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you’ll never meet them.”
— Charles Bukowski

190. “It will rain all this night and we will sleep transfixed by the dark water as our blood runs through our fragile life.”
— Charles Bukowski

191. “I had no Freedom. I had nothing.”
— Charles Bukowski

192. “I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.”
— Charles Bukowski

193. “I met a genius on the train today about 6 years old, he sat beside me and as the train ran down along the coast we came to the ocean and then he looked at me and said, it’s not pretty.”
— Charles Bukowski

194. “Never get out of bed before noon.”
— Charles Bukowski

195. “Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.”
— Charles Bukowski

196. “My part of the game is that I must live the best I can.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

198. “Food is good for the nerves and the spirit. Courage comes from the belly – all else is desperation.”
— Charles Bukowski

199. “We use such big words to move nowhere.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

201. “Sundays kill more people than bombs.”
— Charles Bukowski

202. “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

203. “It’s when you hide things that you choke on them.”
— Charles Bukowski

204. “People do too much. They say too much.”
— Charles Bukowski

205. “In a capitalistic society, the losers slaved for the winners and you have to have more losers than winners.”
— Charles Bukowski

206. “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.”
— Charles Bukowski

207. “The years have gone by quickly. Death sits in the seat next to me. We make a lovely couple.”
— Charles Bukowski

208. “I’ve never met another man I’d rather be.”
— Charles Bukowski

209. “I walk into the kitchen and look at the typer down there on the floor. It’s a dirty floor. It’s a dirty typer that types dirty stories.”
— Charles Bukowski

210. “Love dries up, I thought as I walked back to the bathroom, even faster than sperm.”
— Charles Bukowski

211. “In New York, you’ve got to have all the luck.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

213. “I’m going, she said. I love you but you’re crazy, you’re doomed.”
— Charles Bukowski

214. “The night kept coming on in and there was nothing I could do.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

216. “I was in love again. I was in trouble.”
— Charles Bukowski

217. “Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can’t even cry.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

219. “With me, my main vision for life was to avoid as many people as possible. The less people I saw the better I felt.”
— Charles Bukowski

220. “Well, the rain had stopped but the pain was still there.”
— Charles Bukowski

221. “Love is a form of prejudice. I have too many other prejudices.”
— Charles Bukowski

222. “This incompleteness is all we have.”
— Charles Bukowski

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

224. “Alcohol is probably one of the greatest things to arrive upon the earth – alongside of me.”
— Charles Bukowski

225. “I always started a job with the feeling that I’d soon quit or be fired, and this gave me a relaxed manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power.”
— Charles Bukowski