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
I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.
Interpretation
The quote illustrates the spontaneity and effortless nature of Bukowski's writing process.
Charles Bukowski describes his writing experience as one of unplanned creativity, suggesting that he allows his subconscious to guide his work. He emphasizes the ease and unexpected nature of the ideas that come to him during this process, portraying writing as an instinctive act rather than a structured endeavor.
In practice
During a writing workshop, a facilitator can share this quote to inspire students about embracing creativity.
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.
Gay writers now have both a sense of history and the fables that allows them to dwell in the realms of the ridiculous and at the same time talk seriously about things.
The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.
Color transmits and translates emotion.
Originality is the only thing that counts. But the originator uses material and ideas that occur round him and pass through him. And out of his experience comes the original creation.
My first plays were amazingly bad, but I had a teacher who thought I had promise, and he kept working with me. I finally went to a summer workshop before my senior year with people like Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes who encouraged me to write from my subconscious, and suddenly all this material about culture clash came out.
The singers who are the most honest are the ones who become immortalized.
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