Possessing thousands of books, poems in addition to short stories, the gift of German-born American novelist Charles Bukowski has had a good influence on a lot of reader generations.
Writing about the poor’s everyday life, this laureate of American lowlife writer owns many educational and inspirational quotations and talks throughout the moment. Read on to know more about Charles Bukowski Quotes with Penn Book.
About Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski was a legendary German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Born in Andernach, Germany in 1920, Bukowski moved to the United States with his family at the age of three and grew up in Los Angeles.
He is best known for his gritty and unapologetic writing style that often depicted the underbelly of society and the struggles of the working-class. He wrote about his own experiences, including his struggles with poverty, alcohol, and relationships, and his work has been praised for its raw honesty and realism.
Bukowski’s writing career spanned over five decades and he published numerous books of poetry, short stories, and novels, including “Love is a Dog from Hell,” “Post Office,” and “Hollywood.” He died in 1994, but his work continues to inspire and captivate readers all over the world.
Best Quotes From Charles Bukowski
1. Find what you love and let it kill you.
2. I wanted the whole world or nothing.– Charles Bukowski
3. I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.
4. Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don’t give a damn.
5. No light goes out until it goes out. Let’s fight as men, not rats. Period.
6. Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside – remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.
7. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
8. If I stop writing I am dead. And that’s the only way I’ll stop: dead.
9. If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
10. Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.
11. Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.
12. If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.
13. People are strange: they are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.
14. It’s better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.
15. Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, ‘Don’t try.’ That fits the writing, too. I don’t try; I just type.
16. How the hell could a person enjoy being awakened at 6:30 AM, by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
17. If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.
18. What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.– Charles Bukowski
19. There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.
20. Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.
21. If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery isolation. Isolation is a gift.
All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine.
If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.
22. Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.
23. I would be married, but I’d have no wife, I would be married to a single life.
24. In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.
25. Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.
26. It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.
27. It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.
28. Hey baby, when I write, I’m the hero of my shit.
29. Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.
30. Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
31. When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.
32. You have to die a few times before you can really live.
33. An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
34. There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.
35. If you get married they think you’re finished and if you are without a woman they think you’re incomplete.
36. Of course it’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.
37. This is very important – to take leisure time. The pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you’re gonna lose everything…just to do nothing at all, very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That’s why they’re all totally mad, frustrated, angry, and hateful.
38. I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.
39. Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.
40. Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire…. Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It’s real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you’ve suddenly become an idiot. There’s no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help.
41. You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
42. I don’t like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.
43. Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.
44. Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I’ll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.
45. What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.
46. I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.
47. When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.
48. My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights, and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‘light’ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.
49. The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you’ll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It’s truly ridiculous.
50. Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.
51. The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good when you are near or with them.
52. The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts. While the stupid ones are full of confidence.
53. We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
54. Beware of those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone.
55. My beer-drunk soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world.
56. 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.
57. A spark can set a whole forest on fire. Just a spark. Save it.
58. I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can’t feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.
59. Good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. If you read this after I am dead it means I made it.
60. The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn’t interest you.
61. Nothing is worse than to finish a good shit, then reach over and find the toilet paper container empty. Even the most horrible human being on earth deserves to wipe his ass.
62. Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.
63. There is loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of a clock’s hand.
64. When I think of her life and compare it to other lives more dazzling, original, and beautiful I realized that she has hurt fewer people than anybody I know (and by hurt I simply mean hurt).
She has had some terrible times, times when maybe I should have helped her more for she is the mother of my only child and we were once great lovers, but she has come through like I said she, has hurt fewer people than anybody I know, and if you look at it like that, well, she has created a better world. She has won. Frances, this poem is for you.
65. Beware the average man the average woman beware their love, their love is average seeks average but there is genius in their hatred there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you to kill anybody not wanting solitude not understanding solitude they will attempt to destroy anything that differs from their own not being able to create art they will not understand art they will consider their failure as creators only as a failure of the world.
66. Those who escape hell, however, never talk about it and nothing much bothers them after that.
67. I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.
68. The way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart.
69. Human relationships didn’t work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death–in a cesspool.
70. She was desperate and she was choosey at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn’t have quite enough going for her to become what she imagined herself to be.
71. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.
72. A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.
73. For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum.
I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
74. Human relationships were strange. I mean, you were with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stopped. Then there was a short period when you weren’t with anybody, then another woman arrived, and you ate with her and fucked her, and it all seemed so normal as if you had been waiting just for her and she had been waiting for you. I never felt right being alone; sometimes it felt good but it never felt right.
75. It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.
76. Great art is horse shit, buy tacos.
77. People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.
78. Baby, I said, I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me.
79. The tigers have found me and I do not care.
80. And yet women –– good women –– frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.
81. How the hell could a person enjoy being awakened at 6:30AM, by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
82. Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.
83. I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.
84. My beer drunk soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world.
85. Dogs and angels are not very far apart.
86. Anything is a waste of time unless you are fucking well or creating well or getting well or looming toward a kind of phantom-love-happiness.
87. The best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them.
88. Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must live.
89. He asked, What makes a man a writer? Well, I said, it’s simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.
90. In this land some of us fuck more than we die but most of us die better than we fuck.
91. We drink our coffee and pretend not to look at each other.
92. Still, I kept thinking about Lydia. The good parts of our relationship felt like a rat walking around and gnawing at the inside of my stomach.
93. The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.
94. Why was it that every time you saw a woman like that you were with another woman?
95. But your eyes –– they’re beautiful. They’re wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a forest on fire.
96. I heard a long insane wail like a wolverine shot in the arctic snow and left to bleed and die alone…
97. The lobster tasted good in my mouth, and I drank him down with fine wine. Good fellow. I always liked you in your pink-red shell, dangerous and slow.
98. It was best to stay away from other writers and just do your work…
99. People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.
100. There isn’t a better way to drink than at a small table over a white tablecloth with a good-looking woman.
FAQs
What is the significance of Charles Bukowski quotes?
some believe that Charles Bukowski quotes can be significant because they offer a unique perspective on life, love, and relationships. Others find his writing to be inspirational, providing them with motivation to pursue their own dreams and goals.
Additionally, some simply enjoy the humor and wit that Bukowski often injected into his work. No matter what the reason, there is no doubt that Charles Bukowski quotes have resonated with many people over the years.
Why are his quotes so popular?
Charles Bukowski quotes are popular for a variety of reasons. For one, he was a prolific writer who produced a large body of work over the course of his career. This means that there are plenty of quotes to choose from when looking for something inspirational or thought-provoking.
Additionally, Bukowski was known for his gritty, no-holds-barred approach to life, which is reflected in his quotes. He didn’t shy away from controversial topics or language, and his quotes often reflect this.
Finally, Bukowski was simply a great writer, and his quotes are often poignant and memorable. All of these factors contribute to the popularity of Charles Bukowski quotes.
Where can I find more information about Charles Bukowski and his quotes?
There are many ways to find Charles Bukowski quotes. One way is to simply Google his name and the word “quotes.” This will bring up many websites with collections of his quotes.
Another way is to visit Goodreads.com and search for Bukowski in their quote section. There are also several websites and social media accounts devoted to sharing his quotes.
Finally, one can always read his work directly to find his most memorable lines.
Conclusion
As you can see, Charles Bukowski quotes can be very insightful and thought-provoking. Reading them can definitely benefit you in many ways. If you haven’t read any of his work yet, I highly suggest you do. You won’t regret it. Thanks for reading!
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