Charles Bukowski

you fall into the mirror, come through the other side staring at a lightbulb.

Existence was not only absurd, it was plain hard work. Think of how many times you put on your underwear in a lifetime. It was appalling, it was disgusting, it was stupid.

If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.

So, that’s what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That’s what they needed. People were fools. It was going to be easy for me.

as a child i suppose i was not quite normal. my happiest times were when i was left alone in the house on a saturday.

How are his poems?" "He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.

Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you.

I wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering.

i am going to start selling air in dark orange bags marked: moon-blooms

Long ago, among other lies they were taught that silence was bravery.

there must be a way. surely there must be a way that we have not yet thought of. who put this brain inside of me? it cries it demands it says that there is a chance. it will not say "no.

I never understood society. i undersand that it works somehow and that it functions as a reality and that its realities are necessary to keep us from worse realities. but all i sense are that are plenty of police and jails and judges and laws and that what is meant to protect me is breaking me down.

You just rebel against everything. How are you going to survive? I don't know. I'm already tired.

I had decided against religion a couple of years back. If it were true, it made fools out of people, or it drew fools. And if it weren't true, the fools were all the more foolish. What I need is a good doctor, I thought. You either lived or died.

It didn't pay to trust another human being. Humans didn't have it, whatever it took.

I had no Freedom. I had nothing.

Well, the rain had stopped but the pain was still there.

But she projected vitality - you knew that she was there.

Careful poetry and careful people live only long enough to die safely.

Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.