Great Quotes from Charles Bukowski
CHARLES BUKOWSKI (German-American poet, 1920 – 1994)
Charles Bukowski was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. Charles Bukowski’s work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over 60 books.
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
“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.”
“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.”
“People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.”
“I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.”
“If you get married they think you’re finished and if you are without a woman they think you are incomplete.”
“What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”
“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.”
“If you have the ability to love – love yourself first.”
“There is loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of a clock’s hand.”
“The less I needed, the better I felt.”
“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.”
“Do you hate people?” “I don’t hate them… I just feel better when they’re not around.”
“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.”
“If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.”
“Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.”
“Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It’s like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss.”
“Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.”
“Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.”
“You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time, all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”
“You have to die a few times before you can really live.”
“Of course it’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.”
“We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.”
“There is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy.”
“Life’s as kind as you let it be.”
“I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.”
“Great art is horseshit, by tacos.”
“Who wants sex talks about everything, but not about sex.”
“Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn’t so.”
“Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don’t give a damn.”
“There are only two things wrong with money – too much or too little.”
