I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.
Charles BukowskiRead
The Difference Between Art and Life is that Art is More Bearable
Interpretation
Art allows us to endure life's challenges by providing a unique lens through which to experience and express reality.
This quote suggests that while life can be harsh and difficult to endure, art serves as a means to navigate and soften these experiences. Bukowski implies that art encapsulates the complexity of existence, making it more manageable and bearable, as it allows individuals to explore, understand, and ultimately cope with the various facets of life through creativity and expression.
In practice
In a discussion about coping mechanisms, one might use this quote to highlight the therapeutic nature of art.
I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.
when I am feeling low all i have to do is watch my cats and my courage returns
The masses are always wrong...Wisdom is doing everything the crowd does not do. All you do is reverse the totality of their learning and you have the heaven they're looking for.
I'm going to open another vottle. not a vottle, but a bottle. you open it and I'll drink it. and you try to write as much as I did without falling off of your chair.
To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, canβt sit still, move, or even go decently insane.
I lapsed into my pathetic cut-off period. Often with humans, both good and bad, my senses simply shut off, they get tired, I give up. I am polite. I nod. I pretend to understand because I donβt want anybody to be hurt. That is the one weakness that has lead me into the most trouble. Trying to be kind to others I often get my soul shredded into a kind of spiritual pasta. No matter. My brain shuts off. I listen. I respond. And they are too dumb to know that I am not there.
If you're going to be honest with yourself, you have to admit that you go into show business wanting people to talk about you and wanting everyone to know who you are. But that also means there are going to be a whole bunch of people who don't like you. No matter who you are.
There is one way that architecture is superior to sculpture, and that is scale. You can walk into a building and have it all around you.
I slowly dismantled the act of painting, to consider the possibility that no-thing ever really transcends its immediate environment.
I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him.
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called other, which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.
By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn't need pen or paper - my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape.
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