Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.
--Charles Bukowski
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.
--Charles Bukowski
Do you hate people? I don't hate them... I just feel better when they're not around.
--Charles Bukowski
Don't wait for the good woman. She doesn't exist.
--Charles Bukowski
Find what you love and let it kill you.
--Charles Bukowski
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 stonewritten. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or 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.
--Charles Bukowski
Hell was what you made it.
--Charles Bukowski
I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here.
--Charles Bukowski
I wanted the whole world or nothing.
--Charles Bukowski
I'm no preacher but I can tell you this- the lives that people lead are driving them crazy and their insanity comes out in the way they drive.
--Charles Bukowski
I've had so many knives stuck into me, when they hand me a flower, I can't quite make out what it is. It takes time.
--Charles Bukowski
I've never met another man I'd rather be.
--Charles Bukowski
If I'm an ass, I should say so. If I don't, somebody else will. If I say it first, that disarms them.
--Charles Bukowski
If it doesn't come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don't do it.
--Charles Bukowski
If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
--Charles Bukowski
If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.
--Charles Bukowski
Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself.
--Charles Bukowski
Life's as kind as you let it be.
--Charles Bukowski
Many a good man has been put under the bridge by a woman.
--Charles Bukowski
More often than not Democratic Law works to the advantage of the few even though the many have voted; this, of course, is because the few have told them how to vote.
--Charles Bukowski
My ambition is handicapped by my laziness.
--Charles Bukowski
Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.
--Charles Bukowski
Nobody can save you but yourself and you're worth saving. It's a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.
--Charles Bukowski
Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you.
--Charles Bukowski
People don't need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn't be.
--Charles Bukowski
People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel hate or love.
--Charles Bukowski
She's mad but she's magic, there's no lie in her fire.
--Charles Bukowski
Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and eight times out of nine I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.
--Charles Bukowski
Some people never go crazy, what truly horrible lives they must live.
--Charles Bukowski
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.
--Charles Bukowski
Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.
--Charles Bukowski
The difference between a brave man and a coward is a coward thinks twice before jumping in the cage with a lion. The brave man doesn't know what a lion is. He just thinks he does.
--Charles Bukowski
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.
--Charles Bukowski
The female loves to play man against man, and if she is in a position to do it there is not one who will not resist.
--Charles Bukowski
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.
--Charles Bukowski
The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.
--Charles Bukowski
The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left.
--Charles Bukowski
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubt, while the stupid people are full of confidence.
--Charles Bukowski
The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.
--Charles Bukowski
There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.
--Charles Bukowski
There is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy.
--Charles Bukowski
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.
--Charles Bukowski
There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower.
--Charles Bukowski
We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
--Charles Bukowski
We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
--Charles Bukowski
We have wasted history like a bunch of drunks shooting dice in the men's crapper of the local bar.
--Charles Bukowski
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.
--Charles Bukowski
What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death.
--Charles Bukowski
What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.
--Charles Bukowski
When I went to the Yellow Cab Company I passed the Cancer Building and I remembered that there were worse things than looking for a job you didn't want.
--Charles Bukowski
Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.
--Charles Bukowski
You are marvelous; the gods wait to delight in you.
--Charles Bukowski
You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
--Charles Bukowski
You have to die a few times before you can really live.
--Charles Bukowski
Found 54 occurence(s) in 52,075 quotation(s).