Explore Quotes by Charles Bukowski

Sexual intercourse is kicking death in the ass while singing.

Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important. I mean it's not even as important (physically) as excretion. A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement.

Love is kind of like when you see a fog in the morning, when you wake up before the sun comes out. It's just a little while, and then it burns away... Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it

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

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

I have two rules. One is, never trust a man who smokes a pipe. The other is, never trust a man with shiny shoes.

There's nothing to stop a man from writing unless that man stops himself. If a man truly desires to write, then he will. Rejection and ridicule will only strengthen him. And the longer he is held back the stronger he will become, like a mass of rising water against a dam. There is no losing in writing, it will make your toes laugh as you sleep, it will make you stride like a tiger, it will fire the eye and put you face to face with death. You will die a fighter, you will be honored in hell. The luck of the word. Go with it, send it.

I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn't particularly want money. I didn't know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. The thought of being something didn't only appall me, it sickened me . . . To do things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother's Day . . . was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep.

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

The human heart, as of course we all know is essentially good

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.

Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.

The difference between a brave man and a coward is a coward thinks twice before jumping in the cage with a lion. The brave man doesn't know what a lion is. He just thinks he does.

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

Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.

Beware of those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone.

Knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge.

The hangover was brutal but he didn't mind. It told him he had been somewhere else, someplace good.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

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