Charles Bukowski

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.

I think that everything should be made available to everybody, and I mean LSD, cocaine, codeine, grass, opium, the works. Nothing on earth available to any man should be confiscated and made unlawful by other men in more seemingly powerful and advantageous positions.

When you play the field selfishly everything works against you: one can’t insist on love or demand affection. you’re finally left with whatever you have been willing to give which often is: nothing.

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

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.

Meanwhile the 3 a.m. drunks of the world would lay in their beds, trying in vain to sleep, and deserving that rest, if they could find it.

Where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die.

My body gnaws at me from one side and my spirit gnaws at me from the other.

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.

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

a good book can make an almost impossible existence, liveable ( from 'the luck of the word' )

You know the typical crowd, Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there? Well, yeah. Because there’s nothing out there. It’s stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I’ve never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. That’s all. Sorry for all the millions, but I’ve never been lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have.

Why do we embroider everything we say with special emphasis when all we really need to do is simply say what needs to he said? Of course the fact is that there is very little that needs to be said.

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

I didn't like parties.I didn't know how to dance and people frightened me, especially people at parties. They attempted to be sexy and gay and witty and although they hoped they were good at it, they weren 't. They were bad at it. Their trying so hard only made it worse.

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.

I went over to see Marina two or three or four times a week. I knew as long as I could see the girl I would be all right…. Soon after, I got a letter from Fay. She and the child were living in a hippie commune in New Mexico. It was a nice place, she said. Marina would be able to breathe there. She enclosed a little drawing the girl had made for me.

the best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them

young or old, good or bad, I don't think anything dies as slow and as hard as a writer.

great books are the ones we need

there is enough treachery , hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day