Charles Bukowski

the way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart

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

And yet women-good women--frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.

That the young rich smell the stink of the poor and learn to find it a bit amusing. They had to laugh, otherwise it would be too terrifying.

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

You are thirty minutes late." "Yes." "Would you be thirty minutes late to a wedding or a funeral?" "No." "Why not, pray tell?" "Well, if the funeral was mine I'd have to be on time. If the wedding was mine it would be my funeral.

but as God said, crossing his legs, I see where I have made plenty of poets but not so very much poetry.

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

Fiction is an improvement on life

When I get down to my last dime I'll just walk over to skid row." "There are some real weirdos down there." "They're everywhere.

Turgenev was a very serious fellow but he could make me laugh because a truth first encountered can be very funny. When someone else's truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it just for you, that's great.

There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.

in this room the hours of love still make shadows.

Once in a dream I saw a snake swallowing its own tail, it swallowed and swallowed until it got halfway round, and there it stopped and there it stayed, it was stuffed with its own self. Some fix, that. We only have ourselves to go on, and it's enough.

Love is a form of prejudice. I have too many other prejudices.

The wisdom to quit is all we have left.

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the local bar.

It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

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