80+ Charles Bukowski Quotes And Inspirational Sayings

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Explore the raw and gritty world of Charles Bukowski’s quotes.

That is the essence of life, love, and the human condition.

He was known for his unfiltered perspective and poignant insights.

Bukowski’s words resonate with those who appreciate authenticity and honesty.

Perfect for writers, poets, and fans of unconventional wisdom.

These quotes offer inspiration and reflection.

On the struggles and joys of everyday life.

Discover the profound truths behind Bukowski’s compelling prose!

Find what you love and let it kill you.

You have to die a few times before you can live.

People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

Charles Bukowski Quotes

That’s your answer to everything: drink. No, that’s my answer to nothing.

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us

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.

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.

I went to the bathroom and threw some water on my face, combed my hair. If I could only comb that face, I thought, but I can’t.

Stop insisting on clearing your head—clear your fucking heart instead.

I want so much that is not here and I do not know where to go.

In a capitalistic society the losers slaved for the winners and you have to have more losers than winners. What did I think? I knew politics would never solve it and there wasn’t enough time left to get lucky.

If you have the ability to love, love yourself first

Great writers are indecent people they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. 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.

When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.

I want to be with you, it is as simple, and as complicated as that

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.

what matters most is how well you walk through the fire

Also, visit: Tom and Jerry Quotes

All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was always controlling who got a chance and who didn’t.

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

when you left you took almost everything. I kneel in the nights before tigers that will not let me be. what you were will not happen again. the tigers have found me and I do not care

I don’t hate people. I just feel better when they aren’t around.

Baby, I said, I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me.

Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.

A woman is a full-time job. You have to choose your profession

I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.

Don’t you have a knife somewhere deep in your heart where love left?

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence

Yes, but if you drink or gamble they think it’s a put-down of their love

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others.

How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you’ll never meet them. All right, so we do the best we can. Granted. But we must still realize that love is just the result of a chance encounter

If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.

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.

Even early on, I got it, I stopped looking for the Dream Girl; I just wanted one that wasn’t a nightmare.

A spark can set a whole forest on fire. Just a spark. Save it.

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

There is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy.

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.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

Of course it’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. It didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.

To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it.

If you get married they think you’re finished and if you are without a woman they think you’re incomplete.

there are worse things than being alone but it often takes decades to realize this and most often when you do it’s too late and there’s nothing worse than too late

you begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.

Beware of those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone

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.

My beer drunk soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world.

If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose

People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love

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

Something else is hurting you — that’s why you need pot or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can’t think

What a weary time those years were — to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

Some lose all mind and become soul, insane. some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual. some lose both and become accepted

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.

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. think about it. think about saving your self

The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.

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.

I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of

That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. 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.

I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: ‘Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I’ll be ready.

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.

Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.

being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.

Few beautiful women were willing to indicate in public that they belonged to someone. I had known enough women to realize this. I accepted them for what they were, and love came hard and very seldom. When it did it was usually for the wrong reasons. One simply became tired of holding love back and let it go because it needed some place to go. Then usually, there was trouble.

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.

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

Gradually I came to realize that my understanding of women goes only as far as the pleasure is concerned

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.

those who escape hell however never talk about it and nothing much bothers them after that

Her one drink had Cecelia giggling and talking and she was explaining that animals had souls too. Nobody challenged her opinion. It was possible, we knew. What we weren’t sure of was if we had any

In this land some of us fuck more than we die but most of us die better than we fuck.

Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.

She could talk. If she was a sphinx she could have talked, if she was a stone she could have talked. I wondered when she’d get tired and leave. Even after I stopped listening it was like being battered with tiny pingpong balls

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.

There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you.

A good writer knew when not to write. Anybody could type. Not that I was a good typist; also I couldn’t spell and I didn’t know grammar. But I knew when not to write. It was like fucking. You had to rest the godhead now and then

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.

Turgenev was a very serious fellow but he could make me laugh because a truth first encountered can be very funny. When someone else’s truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it just for you, that’s great

Why was it that every time you saw a woman like that you were with another woman?

I coined a term for certain family members and aquaintances who obsessively quote on social media. I call them the Facebook philosophers. Kind of catchy, huh?

But your eyes –– they’re beautiful. They’re wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a forest on fire.

I heard a long insane wail like a wolverine shot in the arctic snow and left to bleed and die alone…

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