Charles Bukowski

My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.

When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble.

2 p.m. beer nothing matters but flopping on a mattress with cheap dreams and a beer as the leaves die and the horses die and the landladies stare in the halls; brisk the music of pulled shades, a last man's cave in an eternity of swarm and explosion; nothing but the dripping sink, the empty bottle, euphoria, youth fenced in, stabbed and shaven, taught words propped up to die.

Learn, he says, that there will be hours, days and months ahead of feeling absolutely terrible and nothing can change that; neither new girlfriends, health professionals, changes of diet, dope, humility, or God.

Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.

It was like a church in there as only the truly lost sit in bars on Tuesday mornings at 8:00 a.m.

eleven months. now she's gone gone as they go.

the history of melancholia includes all of us.

I was only kidding about the hundred," she says. oh," I say, "what will it cost me?" she lights her cigarette with my lighter and looks at me through the flame: her eyes tell me. look," I say, "I don't think I can ever pay that price again.

the masses are everywhere they know how to do things: they have sane and deadly angers for sane and deadly things.

I thought you were sane," I said, "but you're just as crazy as the rest of them.

I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.

I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.

"Baby," I said. "I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me."

We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting

I didn't have any friends at school, didn't want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to me.

...maybe a damned good night's sleep will bring me back to a gentle sanity. But at the moment, I look about this room and, like myself, it's all in disarray: things fallen out of place, cluttered, jumbled, lost, knocked over and I can't put it straight, don't want to. Perhaps living through these petty days will get us ready for the dangerous ones.

When a writer is swayed with his fame and his fortune, you can float him down the river with the turds.

I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future.

don't be ashamed of anything; I guess God meant it all like locks on doors.

I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.