Charles Bukowski

Without literature, life is hell.

I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas.

The Difference Between Art and Life is that Art is More Bearable

Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don't give a damn.

Sexual intercourse is kicking death in the ass while singing.

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus!

The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest; true creation is a solitary act.

I would say that Mickey Mouse has a greater influence on the American public than Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Rabelais, Shostakovitch, Lenin, and/or Van Gogh. Which says 'What?' about the American Public. Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.

There's nothing else as pleasant as being unpleasant when there's nothing else to do, and there's usually nothing else to do.

Knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge.

When I'm drinking around people, I tend to get silly or pugnacious or wild, which can cause problems.

Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateurs drunks, the bores.

Long before I became 'rich and famous' I just sat round drinking wine and staring at the walls.

Drinking is another way of thinking, another way of living. It gives you two lives instead of one.

It’s never quite right, all the things we are taught, all the loves we chase, all the deaths we die, all the lives we live.

since some people had told me that I was ugly, I always preferred shade to the sun, darkness to light

Her eyes always had a frantic, lost look. He could never cure her eyes of that.

I knew exactly what I was doing: I was doing nothing. because I knew there was nothing to do.

I could never accept life as it was, I could never gobble down all its poisons bu there were parts, tenuous magic parts open for the asking.

I am too sick to lay down the sidewalks frighten me the whole damned city frightens me, what I will become what I have become frightens me.

Insanity is relative. Who sets the norm?