Charles Bukowski

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.
If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.
I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water.
Hospitals and jails and whores: these are the universities of life. I’ve got several degrees. Call me Mr.
Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.
The ass is the face of the soul of sex.
And yet women — the decent ones — frightened me because they would finally want your soul, and I wanted to keep what was left of mine.
There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I’m too tough for him.
There’s music in everything, even defeat.
I wanted the whole world or nothing.
An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.
They never tell you that it’s nine to five plus commuting plus lunch plus overtime. People become empty. Bodies with fearful and slavish minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. The body. The hair. The nails. The shoes. Everything.
When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.
My beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.
My ambition is handicapped by my laziness.
The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and if he knows a bunch of other writers it’s terrible. It’s like a bunch of flies on the same piece of shit.
It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. 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?
I don’t hate people. I just feel better when they’re not around.
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.
Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it.
The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.
The difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable.
Baby, I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me.
What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.
That’s the problem with drinking. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.
You have to die a few times before you can really live.
People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel hate or love.
People don’t need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn’t be.

last edited: 2026-08-25 13:32