My Favorite Charles Bukowski Quotes & Poems
I picked up a worn-out copy of The Pleasures of the Damned by Bukowski while living on the road in England back in 2011. I was tired of order and tidy people, everyone acting fine. Bukowski was raw and real, dirty and decadent and I loved it.
the pleasures of the damned is still my favorite Bukowski collection if you’re looking to get into his writings.
You can find it on amazon here.
“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.”
– Charles Bukowski
“Today I will walk in the sun. I will simply walk in the sun.”
– Charles Bukowski, Selected Letters 1960–1970
“I want so much that is not here and I do not know where to go.”
– Charles Bukowski
“I want to be with you, it is as simple, and as complicated as that.”
— Charles Bukowski
“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.”
– Charles Bukowski
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.
— Charles Bukowski
“I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.”
– Charles Bukowski
“Don’t you have a knife somewhere deep in your heart where love left?”
— Charles Bukowski
Roll the Dice
if you’re going to try, go all the
way.
otherwise, don’t even start.
if you’re going to try, go all the
way. this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind.
go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or
4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.
isolation is the 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.
do it, do it, do it.
do it.
all the way
all the way.
you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter,
it’s the only good fight
there is.
– Charles Bukowski
“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.”
– Charles Bukowski
“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.”
— Charles Bukowski, Women
“question and answer”
he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer
night, running the blade of the knife
under his fingernails, smiling, thinking
of all the letters he had received
telling him that
the way he lived and wrote about
that —
it had kept them going when
all seemed
truly
hopeless.
putting the blade on the table, he
flicked it with a finger
and it whirled
in a flashing circle
under the light.
who the hell is going to save
me? he
thought.
as the knife stopped spinning
the answer came:
you’re going to have to
save yourself.
still smiling,
a: he lit a
cigarette
b: he poured
another
drink
c: gave the blade
another
spin.
– Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems
“The less I needed, the better I felt.” — Charles Bukowski
“In the days when I thought I was a genius and starved and nobody published me I used to waste much more time in the libraries than I do now. It was best to get an empty table where the sun came through a window and get the sun on my neck and the back of my head and my hands and then I did not feel so bad that all the books were dull in their red and orange and green and blue covers sitting there like mockeries. It was best to get the sun on my neck and then dream and doze and try not to think of rent and food and America and responsibility. Whether I was a genius or not did not so much concern me as the fact that I simply did not want a part of anything. The animal-drive and energy of my fellow man amazed me: that a man could change tires all day long or drive and icecream truck or run for Congress or cut into a man’s guts in surgery or murder, this was all beyond me. I did not want to begin. I still don’t. Any day that I could cheat away from this system of living seemed a good victory for me. I drank wine and slept in the parks and starved….”
– Charles Bukowski
“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.”
— Charles Bukowski
"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.”
– Charles Bukowski, oh, yes
“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
– Charles Bukowski
“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.” — Charles Bukowski
“there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.
people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.
people just are not good to each other
one on one.
the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.
we are afraid.
our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.
it hasn’t told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.
or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone
untouched
unspoken to
watering a plant.”
– Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
“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.”
— Charles Bukowski
So you want to be a writer?
if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you, do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wife or your girlfriend
or your boyfriend or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.
don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of people
who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and pretentious,
don’t be consumed with self- love.
the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is burning your gut,
don’t do it.
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by itself and
it will keep on doing it until you die
or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.
– 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, Tales of Ordinary Madness
“… and we are in bed together
laughing
and we don’t care
about anything.”
– Charles Bukowski
“I was laying in bed one night and I thought I’ll just quit. To hell with it. And another little voice inside me said “Don’t quit. Save that tiny little ember of spark. And never give them that spark because as long as you have that spark, you can start the greatest fire again.”
– Bukowski
