Explore Quotes by Charles Bukowski

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.

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.

When I write, when I'm going hot, I don't want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you're pushing it.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

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.

You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.

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

When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.

Much publishing is done through politics, friends, and natural stupidity.

I used to live on one candy bar a day - it cost a nickel. I always remember the candy bar was called Payday. That was my payday. And that candy bar tasted so good, at night I would take one bite, and it was so beautiful.

I don't write so much now. I'm getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.

My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.

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.

I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

Shakespeare didn't work at all for me.

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: 'Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don't you realize that?' They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn't want to enter their minds.

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.