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
There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The act of writing requires solitude, and true understanding comes from genuine experience.
Bukowski suggests that authentic writing stems from solitude and deep personal experience. He contrasts the isolation necessary for creativity with a critique of those who write without truly engaging with the world around them, implying that genuine insights and storytelling come from direct interaction with life and its complexities.
Themes
WritingSolitudeExperienceCreativityAuthenticity
In practice
Example use cases
A motivational speech for writers in a workshop.
More from Charles Bukowski
All quotes →when I am feeling low all i have to do is watch my cats and my courage returns
Charles BukowskiRead
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.
Charles BukowskiRead
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.
Charles BukowskiRead
To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.
Charles BukowskiRead
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 don’t 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.
Charles BukowskiRead
Similar quotes
My raps are a decision, rabble rousing, spiritual, like gospel music. I don't want to dance. We have so many things to deal with, we need to talk straight up and down.
Tupac ShakurRead
What is the main problem of the actor? It is to keep the audience awake, and not let them go to sleep, then wake up and go home feeling they've wasted their money.
Laurence OlivierRead
If, in 2014, we're still making 'white savior movies,' then it's just lazy and unfortunate. We've grown up as a country, and cinema should be able to reflect what's true. And what's true is that black people are the center of their own lives and should tell their own stories from their own perspectives.
Ava DuvernayRead
A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for both the audience and the film-makers. I think that The Game is a movie and I think Fight Club's a film. I think that Fight Club is more than the sum of its parts, whereas Panic Room is the sum of its parts. I didn't look at Panic Room and think, "Wow, this is gonna set the world on fire". These are footnote movies, guilty pleasure movies. Thrillers. Woman-trapped-in-a-house movies. They're not particularly important.
David FincherRead
Everything comes out in blues music: joy , pain , struggle . Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.
Wynton MarsalisRead
A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.
Federico FelliniRead