Bukowski Life Quotes & Sayings

Some men never
die
and some men never
live
but we're all alive
tonight. — Charles Bukowski

Gathered around me were the weak instead of the strong, the ugly instead of the beautiful, the losers instead of the winners. It looked like it was my destiny to travel in their company through life. That didn't bother me so much as the fact that I seemed irresistible to these dull idiot fellows. — Charles Bukowski

I like to prowl ordinary places
and taste the people-
from a distance. — Charles Bukowski

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

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

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the 'light' and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar. — Charles Bukowski

So many people are doomed by their ambition and their gathered intelligence, their bank account and savings and loan intelligence. If there is any secret to life, that secret is not to try. Let it come to you: women, dogs, death, and creation. — Charles Bukowski

Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life. — Charles Bukowski

Despite what you've read, your sadness is not beautiful. No one will see you in the bookstore, curled up with your Bukowski, and want to save you.
Stop waiting for a salvation that will not come from the grey-eyed boy looking for an annotated copy of Shakespeare,
for an end to your sadness in Keats.
He coughed up his lungs at 25, and flowery words cannot conceal a life barely lived.
Your life is fragile, just beginning, teetering on the violent edge of the world.
Your sadness will bury you alive, and you are the only one who can shovel your way out with hardened hands and ragged fingernails, bleeding your despair into the unforgiving earth.
Darling, you see, no heroes are coming for you. Grab your sword, and don your own armor. — Emily Palermo

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now. — Charles Bukowski

There is always somebody about to ruin your day, if not your life. — 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 idea, of course, might be to let them know that writing needn't be hard work; the hard work is getting out of bed in the morning or at noon; the hard work is looking at people's faces in long supermarket lines; the hard work is working for somebody else who is making money using your life's hours and years. — Charles Bukowski

Without literature, life is hell. — 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

You were the only one
who understood
the futility of the
arrangement of
life;
all the others were only
displeased with
trivial segments,
carped
nonsensically about
nonsense;
Jane, you were
killed by
knowing too much. — Charles Bukowski

She wasn't very
interesting
but few people
are. — Charles Bukowski

I like to prowl ordinary places.
I feel sorry for us all or glad for us
all
caught alive together
and awkward in that way.
there's nothing better than the joke
of us
the seriousness of us
the dullness of us — Charles Bukowski

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

I found the best thing
I could do
was just to type away
at my own work
and let the dying
die
as they always have. — Charles Bukowski

Having nothing to struggle
against
they have nothing to struggle
for. — Charles Bukowski

When Whitman wrote, "I sing the body electric"
I know what he
meant
I know what he
wanted:
to be completely alive every moment
in spite of the inevitable.
we can't cheat death but we can make it
work so hard
that when it does take
us
it will have known a victory just as
perfect as
ours — Charles Bukowski

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

DEATH COMES SLOWLY LIKE ANTS TO A FALLEN FIG — Charles Bukowski

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

Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought. — Charles Bukowski

What's fiction?" "Fiction is an improvement on life. — Charles Bukowski

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

...there comes a time in each man's life when he must choose to stand or run. I choose to stand. — Charles Bukowski

It's like a movie, I thought, like a fucking movie. It seemed funny to me. It felt as if we were on camera. I liked it. It was better than the racetrack, it was better than the boxing matches. We kept drinking. — Charles Bukowski

in the most decent sometimes sun
there is the softsmoke feeling from urns
and the canned sound of old battleplanes
and if you go inside and run your finger
along the window ledge you'll find
dirt, maybe even earth.
and if you look out the window
there will be the day, and as you
get older you'll keep looking
keep looking
sucking your tongue in a little
ah ah no no maybe

some do it naturally
some obscenely
everywhere. — Charles Bukowski

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

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

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

the gods seldom
give
but so quickly
take. — Charles Bukowski

After dinner or lunch or whatever it was
with my crazy 12-hour night I was no longer sure what was what
I said, Look, baby, I'm sorry, but don't you realize that this job is driving me crazy? Look, let's give it up. Let's just lay around and make love and take walks and talk a little. Let's go to the zoo. Let's look at animals. Let's drive down and look at the ocean. It's only 45 minutes. Let's play games in the arcades. Let's go to the races, the Art Museum, the boxing matches. Let's have friends. Let's laugh. This kind of life like everybody else's kind of life: it's killing us. — Charles Bukowski

I can see where
creation often
stops while the
body still lives
and often
does not care
to.
the death of life
before life
dies. — Charles Bukowski

I was like a turd that drew flies instead of like a flower that butterflies and bees desired. I wanted to live alone,I felt best being alone, cleaner,,, — Charles Bukowski

Henry Chinaski, the principal said over the microphone. And I walked forward. There was no applause. The one kindly soul in the audience gave two or three clasps. — Charles Bukowski

My laughter was all there inside of me waiting to roar out: HAHAHAHAHA, o my god o my HAHAHAHA. It felt so good when it happened. Dee Dee knew something about life. Dee Dee knew that what happened to one happened to most of us. Our lives were not so different - even though we liked to think so. — Charles Bukowski

I'm not a guru. I wish you wouldn't pose these things at me, man. Ask me about women or something. — Charles Bukowski

Tell him to seek the stars and he will kill himself with climbing. — Charles Bukowski

there's nothing to
discuss
there's nothing to
remember
there's nothing to
forget

it's sad
and
it's not
sad

seems the
most sensible
thing
a person can
do
is
sit
with drink in
hand
as the walls
wave
their goodbye
smiles

one comes through
it
all
with a certain
amount of
efficiency and
bravery
then
leaves

some accept
the possibility of
God
to help them
get
through

others
take it
staight on

and to these

I drink
tonight. — Charles Bukowski

When you take it away do it slowly and easily make it as if I were dying in my sleep instead of in my life, amen. — Charles Bukowski

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

there wasn't a stove
and we put cans of beans
in hot water in the sink
to heat them
up
and we read the Sunday papers
on Monday
after digging them out of the
trash cans
but somehow we managed
money for wine
and the
rent
and the money came off
the streets
out of hock shops
out of nowhere
and all that mattered
was the next
bottle
and we drank and sang
and
fought
were in and out
of drunk
tanks
car crashes
hospitals
we barricaded ourselves
against the
police
and the other roomers
hated
us
and the desk clerk
of the hotel
feared
us
and it went on
and
on
and it was one of the
most wonderful times
of my
life.
-- Bumming with Jane — Charles Bukowski

Presumed that the reader was as fascinated by her life as she was - which was a deadly mistake. The other deadly mistakes she had made were too numerous to mention. — Charles Bukowski

You are good but you are too emotional
the way to whip life is to quietly frame the agony,study it and put it to sleep in the abstract.
is there anything less abstract
than dying everyday and
on the last day? — Charles Bukowski

Hey, Hank, I notice all the women around your place lately ... good looking stuff; you're doing all right."
"Sam," I say, "that's not true; I am one of God's most lonely men. — Charles Bukowski

The factories, the jails, the drunken days and nights, the hospitals have weakened and shaken me like a mouse in the mouth of a hip-cat: life.
- from an Aug. 1965 letter to Jim Roman
"On Cats — Bukowski

Your life is your life — Charles Bukowski

The flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh. — Charles Bukowski

I needed a vacation. I needed 5 women. I needed to get the wax out of my ears. My car needed an oil change. I'd failed to file my damned income tax. One of the stems had broken off of my reading glasses. There were ants in my apartment. I needed to get my teeth cleaned. My shoes were run down at the heels. I had insomnia. My auto insurance had expired. I cut myself every time i shaved. I hadn't laughed in 6 years. I tended to worry when there was nothing to worry about. And when there was something to worry about, i got drunk. — Charles Bukowski

I'd decided the campus was just a place to hide. There were some campus freaks who stayed on forever. The whole college scene was soft. They never told you what to expect out there in the real world. They just crammed you with theory and never told you how hard the pavements were. A college education could destroy an individual for life. Books could make you soft. When you put them down, and really went out there, then you needed to know what they never told you. — Charles Bukowski

sometimes it's hard to know
what to
do. — Charles Bukowski

When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity. — Charles Bukowski

Nothing in the air but
clouds. nothing in the air but
rain. each man's life too short to
find meaning and
all the books almost a
waste.
I sit and listen to them
singing
I sit and listen to
them. — Charles Bukowski

I had never been a dresser. My shirts were all faded and shrunken, 5 or 6 years old, threadbare. My pants the same. I hated department stores, I hated the clerks, they acted so superior, they seemed to know the secret of life, they had a confidence I didn't possess. My shoes were always broken down and old, I disliked shoe stores too. I never purchased anything until it was completely unusable, and that included automobiles. It wasn't a matter of thrift, I just couldn't bear to be a buyer needing a seller, seller being so handsome and aloof and superior. Besides, it all took time, time when you could just be laying around and drinking. — Charles Bukowski

the gods play no
favorites. — Charles Bukowski

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

I couldn't get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. 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

Sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone
are the dead
rattling the walls
that close us in. — Charles Bukowski

Life's as kind as you let it be. — Charles Bukowski

Death is nothing, brother, it's life that's hard — Charles Bukowski

The street to my left was backed up with traffic and I watched the people waiting patiently in the cars. There was almost always a man and a women, staring straight ahead, not talking. It was, finally, for everyone, a matter of waiting. You waited and you waited- for the hospital, the doctor, the plumber, the madhouse, the jail, papa death himself. First the signal red, then the signal was green. The citizens of the world ate food and watched t.v. and worried about their jobs or lack of the same, while they waited. — Charles Bukowski

We are burning like a chicken wing left on the grill of an outdoor barbecue
we are unwanted and burning we are burning and unwanted
we are
an unwanted
burning
as we sizzle and fry
to the bone
the coals of Dante's 'Inferno' spit and sputter beneath
us
and
above the sky is an open hand
and
the words of wise men are useless
it's not a nice world, a nice world it's
not ... — Charles Bukowski

Isolation is a gift. Everything else is just a test of your endurance. You will be alone with the Gods. Your nights will flame with fire. — Charles Bukowski

Consummation Of Grief

I even hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and the water
is their tears.
I listen to the water
on nights I drink away
and the sadness becomes so great
I hear it in my clock
it becomes knobs upon my dresser
it becomes paper on the floor
it becomes a shoehorn
a laundry ticket
it becomes
cigarette smoke
climbing a chapel of dark vines. . .
it matters little
very little love is not so bad
or very little life
what counts
is waiting on walls
I was born for this
I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead. — Charles Bukowski

I care for you, darling, I love you,
the only reason I fucked L. is because you fucked
Z. and then I fucked R. and you fucked N.
and because you fucked N. I had to fuck
Y. But I think of you constantly, I feel you
here in my belly like a baby, love I'd call it,
no matter what happens I'd call it love, and so
you fucked C. and then before I could move
you fucked W., so I had to fuck D. But
I want you to know that I love you, I think of you
constantly, I don't think I've ever loved anybody
like I love you. — Charles Bukowski

as long as there are
human beings about
there is never going to be
any peace
for any individual
upon this earth (or
anywhere else
they might
escape to).

all you can do
is maybe grab
ten lucky minutes
here
or maybe an hour
there.

something
is working toward you
right now, and
I mean you
and nobody but
you. — Charles Bukowski

I
have a face like a washrag. I sing
love songs and carry steel.
I would rather die than cry. I can't
stand hounds can't live without them.
I hang my head against the white
refrigerator and want to scream like
the last weeping of life forever but
I am bigger than the mountains. — Charles Bukowski

Whether I was a genius or not did not so much concern me as the fact that I simply did not want a part of anything. The animal-drive and energy of my fellow man amazed me: that a man could change tires all day long or drive an ice cream truck or run for Congress or cut into a man's guts in surgery or murder, this was all beyond me. I did not want to begin. I still don't. Any day I that I could cheat away from this system of living seemed a good victory for me. — Charles Bukowski

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

A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won't let go. — Charles Bukowski

I tried some more. It was tasting better. I was feeling better. "This stuff belongs to your father, Baldy. I shouldn't drink it all." "He doesn't care. He's stopped drinking." Never had I felt so good. It was better than masturbating. I went from barrel to barrel. It was magic. Why hadn't someone told me? With this, life was great, a man was perfect, nothing could touch him. I stood up straight and looked at Baldy. "Where's your mother? I'm going to fuck your mother! — Charles Bukowski

I beg to differ on Charles Bukowski, who says nothing can save you, except writing. Sometimes, absolutely nothing will save you, not the nights you end up wasting waiting for something grand to happen, not the mornings where coffee has no taste and you wake up knowing the day will not be a blast, not the plans and schemes you write down on your imaginary flipchart to make the world go round. You end up stuck, alone and in the disparate points of chaos that drag you down, you have to come up with something to save yourself. Then you make six impossible wishes before breakfast, start walking and working and learn to seize what you call paranormal activity when it comes true. — Ioana-Cristina Casapu

A man needed somebody. There wasn't anybody around, so you had to make up somebody, make him up to be like a man should be. It wasn't make-believe or cheating. The other way was make-believe and cheating: living your life without a man like him around. — Charles Bukowski

One doesn't even think of
the liver
and if the liver
doesn't think of
us, that's
fine. — Charles Bukowski

There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless. — Charles Bukowski

I'm fucking the grave, I thought, I'm bringing the dead back to life ... — Charles Bukowski

That boy was ready for his life to come, he would undoubtedly be highly successful, the lying little prick. — Charles Bukowski

to ignore life at the proper time takes a special wisdom: like a Happy New Year to you all. — Charles Bukowski

It does seem
the more we drink
the better the words
go. — Charles Bukowski

Morning night and noon the traffic moves through and the murder and treachery of friends and lovers and all the people move through you. pain is the joy of knowing the unkindest truth that arrives without warning. life is being alone death is being alone. even the fools weep morning night and noon. — Charles Bukowski

That's ONE thing that's wrong with intellectuals and writers - they don't feel a hell of a lot except their own comfort or their own pain. which is normal but shitty. — Charles Bukowski

The dog approached again, cautiously. I found the bologna sandwich, ripped off a chunk, wiped the cheap watery mustard off, then placed it on the sidewalk.
The dog walked up to the bit of sandwich, put his nose to it, sniffed, then turned and walked off. This time he didn't look back. He accelerated down the street.
No wonder I had been depressed all my life. I wasn't getting proper nourishment. — Charles Bukowski

I feel no grief for being called something
which
I am not;
in fact, it's enthralling, somehow, like a good
back rub — Charles Bukowski

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go. — Charles Bukowski

No life anywhere, no life in this town or this place or in this weary existence — Charles Bukowski

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

The Laughing Heart your life is your life don't let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is a light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. 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. you are marvelous the gods wait to delight in you. — Charles Bukowski

That which interests most people leaves me without any interest at all. This includes a list of things such as: social dancing, riding roller coasters, going to zoos, picnics, movies, planetariums, watching tv, baseball games; going to funerals, weddings, parties, basketball games, auto races, poetry readings, museums, rallies, demonstrations, protests, children's plays, adult plays ... I am not interested in beaches, swimming, skiing, Christmas, New Year's, the 4th of July, rock music, world history, space exploration, pet dogs, soccer, cathedrals and great works of Art. How can a man who is interested in almost nothing write about anything? Well, I do. I write and I write about what's left over: a stray dog walking down the street, a wife murdering her husband, the thoughts and feelings of a rapist as he bites into a hamburger sandwich; life in the factory, life in the streets and rooms of the poor and mutilated and the insane, crap like that, I write a lot of crap like that — Charles Bukowski

age is no crime but the shame of a deliberately wasted life among so many deliberately wasted lives is. — Charles Bukowski

Sometimes things are just what they seem to be and that's all there is to it. — Charles Bukowski

People who eat 3 meals a day throughout life
have never really
tasted
Food ... — Charles Bukowski

Why don't we go back out there and tell them what happened?
because nothing happened except that everybody has been driven insane and stupid by life. in this society there are only two things that count: don't be caught without money and don't get caught high on any kind of high.
(Night Streets of Madness) — Charles Bukowski

I paid, got up, walked
to the door, opened
it.
I heard the man
say, "that guy's
nuts."
out on the street I
walked north
feeling
curiously
honored. — Charles Bukowski

And my own affairs were as bad, as dismal, as the day I had been born. The only difference was that now I could drink now and then, though never often enough. Drink was the only thing that kept a man from feeling forever stunned and useless. Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought. God, they all had assholes and sexual organs and their mouths and their armpits. They shit and they chattered and they were dull as horse dung. The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun. I would certainly never be able to be happy, to get married, I could never have children. Hell, I couldn't even get a job as a dishwasher. — Charles Bukowski

The last cigarettes are smoked, the loaves are sliced,
and lest this be taken for wry sorrow,
drown the spider in wine.
you are much more than simply dead:
I am a dish for your ashes,
I am a fist for your vanished air.
the most terrible thing about life
is finding it gone. — Charles Bukowski

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