Explore Quotes by Charles Bukowski

There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you'll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There's nothing to get excited about. They just know. They're saviours.

Sometimes I've called writing a disease. If so, I'm glad that it caught me.

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.

I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.

I do not like the human race. I don't like their heads, I don't like their faces, I don't like their feet, I don't like their conversations, I don't like their hairdos, I don't like their automobiles.

Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, 'Don't try.' That fits the writing, too. I don't try; I just type.

It's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the 'light' and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.

If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women, it is because of these who I met were that. There are many 'bads' - bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even 'bad' white males. Only, when you write about 'bad' white males, they don't complain about it. And need I say that there are 'good' blacks, 'good' homosexuals and 'good' women?

A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won't let go.

The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you'll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It's truly ridiculous.

You have my soul and I have your money

I was their bar freak, they needed me to make themselves feel better. just like, at times, I needed that graveyard.