Charles Bukowski

A woman must be nursed into subsistence by love, where a man can become stronger by being hated." - from 'Cows in Art Class

writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.

when the phone rings I too would like to hear words that might ease some of this.

some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about.

that your power of command with simple language was one of the magnificent things of our century. (from the poem: result)

escape from the black widow spider is a miracle as great as art. what a web she can weave slowly drawing you to her she'll embrace you then when she's satisfied she'll kill you still in her embrace and suck the blood from you.

dont undress my love you might find a mannequin dont undress the mannequin you might find love. shes long ago forgotten me. hes trying on a new hat and looks more the coquette then ever. she is a child and a mannequin and death. i can't hate that. she didnt do anything unusual. I only wanted her to.

i am with the roots of flowers entwined, entombed sending up my passionate blossoms as a flight of rockets and argument; wine churls my throat, above me feet walk upon my brain, monkies fall from the sky clutching photographs of the planets, but i seek only music and the leisure of my pain

I'm only interested in poetry.

That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.

and I laugh, I can still laugh, who can't laugh when the whole thing is so ridiculous that only the insane, the clowns, the half-wits, the cheaters, the whores, the horseplayers, the bankrobbers, the poets ... are interesting?

and love was lightning and remembrance

New Year's Eve always terrifies me.

I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn't a nightmare.

There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on. Yet most people are stricken with fear. They fear failure so much that they fail. They are too conditioned, too used to being told what to do. It begins with the family, runs through school and goes into the business world.

But my whole life has been a matter of fighting for one simple hour to do what I want to do. There was always something getting in the way of my getting to myself.

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.

Some people have written that my writing has helped them go on. It has helped me too. The writing, the roses, the 9 cats.

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.

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.

There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.