Charles Bukowski is a famous German-American novelist, poet, and short-story writer. The publication he choose to release his writings would be rich overnight.
Charles Bukowski quotes brings together the social issues, political issue, issues about humanity, drinking issues, and many more which was a problem at that time.
Bukowski was expressive with his work and was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic state of his home city Los angles. He had seen many situations from his childhood to adulthood that no one could suffer.
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Charles Bukowski
Henry Charles Bukowski was born on August 16, 1920, in Germany to a German-American father Henry Bukowski, and German mother Katharina.
Bukowski had a strong German accent in his English and was bullied by his friends. His father was very abusive towards him and his mother physically and mentally.
Charles Bukowski spent his teen in fear, depression, humiliation, and torcher. He insists these are the good things that happened to him as they helped him in writing. All those pain would come out in the words that he wrote.
After completing his study when Bukowski came to New York City to begin a career. He was arrested by an FBI agent as a suspect when America and Germany were at war.
Charles Bukowski worked as a clerk in the post office from 1950 to 1969, then he got an offer from Black Sparrow Press publishers. He got a job in full-time writing, his very first novel was successful for both the Black Sparrows and Bukowski.
Charles Bukowski Quotes
Bukowski was an arrogant, indulgent, and controversial person, but people accepted him for his truthfulness and clarity. Whatever he wrote was extraordinary and a treasure.
Bukowski’s writing was dark, intense, simple, alarming, outrageous, and funny too. Here are some of the famous and best Charles Bukowski quotes.
Charles Bukowski Quotes On Love
Charles Bukowski avoided parental love or that ambiance in his home during childhood made him feel the importance of love. Here are some of the Bukowski quotes on love that will melt your heart.
- “Look, let me put it this way: with me, you’re number one and there isn’t even a number two.” – Charles Bukowski
2. “Love is kind of like when you see a fog in the morning, when you wake up before the sun comes out. It’s just a little while, and then it burns away… Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.” – Charles Bukowski
3. “There is a place in the heart that will never be filled; a space. And even during the best moments, and the greatest times, we will know it.” – Charles Bukowski
4. “And there I was, 225 pounds, perpetually lost and confused, short legs, ape-like upper body, all chest, no neck, head too large, blurred eyes, hair uncombed, 6 feet of geek, waiting for her.” – Charles Bukowski
5. “Find what you love and let it kill you.” – Charles Bukowski
6. “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.” – Charles Bukowski
7. “Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. 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.” – Charles Bukowski
8. “A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.” – Charles Bukowski
9. “I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.” – Charles Bukowski
10. “love be damned now as love was damned when it first arrived.” – Charles Bukowski
11. “I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.” – Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski Quotes On Relationships
Charles Bukowski was a very straightforward and arrogant person. He would go to anyone and clear the shit out. Here are some Charles Bukowski quotes on relationships with people.
12. “That was love, that was bravery. S**t, who could really stand me? anyone who could stand me had a lot of forgiveness of soul.” – Charles Bukowski
13. “Of course it’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.” – Charles Bukowski
14. “Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don’t give a damn.” – Charles Bukowski
15. “That’s what friendship is, sharing the prejudice of experience.“ – Charles Bukowski
16. “Don’t do it. Don’t love me.” – Charles Bukowski
17. “When a hot woman meets a hermit one of them is going to change.” – Charles Bukowski
18. “Human relationships didn’t work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death–in a cesspool.” – Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski Quotes On Death
Bukowski was known for his dark writing, as he suffered such harsh treatment during his childhood. He might have overcome the fear of death or felt it during those time. Here are some of the Bukowski quotes on death.
19. “You have to die a few times before you can really live.” – Charles Bukowski
20. “Death is nothing, brother, it’s life that’s hard.” – Charles Bukowski
21. “I wasn’t going anywhere and neither was the rest of the world. We were all just hanging around waiting to die and meanwhile doing little things to fill the space. Some of us weren’t even doing little things. We were vegetables.“ – Charles Bukowski
22. “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
23. “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.” – Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski Quotes On Life
24. “Once a man sees how dark life can be then he doesn’t worry much about his life afterward. Here are some of the Charles Bukowski quotes on life.” – Charles Bukowski
25. “My whole life has been a matter of fighting for one simple hour to do what I want to do.” – Charles Bukowski
26. “Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” – Charles Bukowski
27. “How the hell could a person enjoy being awakened at 6:30 AM, by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, s—t, 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?” – Charles Bukowski
28. “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.” – Charles Bukowski
29. “Age is no crime but the shame of a deliberately wasted life among so many deliberately wasted lives is.” – Charles Bukowski
30. “The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life to a function that doesn’t interest you.” – Charles Bukowski
31. “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
32. “Life’s as kind as you let it be.” – Charles Bukowski
33. “We waited and waited. All of us. Didn’t the shrink know that waiting was one of the things that drove people crazy? People waited all their lives. They waited to live, they waited to die. They waited in line to buy toilet paper. They waited in line for money. And if they didn’t have any money they waited in longer lines. You waited to go to sleep and then you waited to awaken. You waited to get married and you waited to get divorced. You waited for it to rain, you waited for it to stop. You waited to eat and then you waited to eat again. You waited in a shrink’s office with a bunch of psychos and you wondered if you were one.” – Charles Bukowski
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Charles Bukowski Quotes On Women
According to the friends of Bukowski, whenever he use to see any woman around him then he would act as the Man. But when there are no women around he is very friendly, curious, and persuasive. – Charles Bukowski
Here are some of the Bukowski quotes he gave on women. – Charles Bukowski
35. “She had wild eyes, slightly insane. She also carried an overload of compassion that was real enough and which obviously cost her something.” – Charles Bukowski
36. “If you get married, they think you’re finished. And if you are without a woman they think you’re incomplete.” – Charles Bukowski
37. “I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn’t a nightmare.” – Charles Bukowski
38. “And yet women -good women- frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep. Basically I craved prostitutes, base women, because they were deadly and hard and made no personal demands. Nothing was lost when they left. Yet at the same time I yearned for a gentle, good woman, despite the overwhelming price.” – Charles Bukowski
39. “Maybe she hadn’t saved the world but she had made a major improvement.” – Charles Bukowski
40. “Never had I known a young girl so beautiful and at the same time so gentle and intelligent. Where were her men? Where had they failed?” – Charles Bukowski
41. “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
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Best Bukowski Quotes
This Charles Bukowski quotes includes his saying about humanity and his motivational words about society and our part in it.
42. “You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.” – Charles Bukowski
43. “Like anybody can tell you, I am not a very nice man. I don’t know the word. I have always admired the villain, the outlaw, the son of a bitch. 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 also like vile women, drunk cursing b**ches with loose stockings and sloppy mascara faces. I’m more interested in perverts than saints. I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don’t like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don’t like to be shaped by society.” – Charles Bukowski
44. “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.” – Charles Bukowski
45. “We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.” – Charles Bukowski
46. “My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.” – Charles Bukowski
47. “The f—kers. There, I feel better. God-damned human race. There, I feel better.“ – Charles Bukowski
48. “Do not ignore it. F**k it. Cry your heart out. Then f**k it some more.” – Charles Bukowski
49. “If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.” – Charles Bukowski
50. “If you persisted long enough, the good luck usually came. Most people couldn’t wait on the luck, though, so they quit.” – Charles Bukowski
51. “Wherever the crowd goes, run in the other direction. They’re always wrong.” – Charles Bukowski
52. “You can forgive a fool because he only runs in one direction and doesn’t deceive anybody. It’s the deceivers who make you feel bad.” – Charles Bukowski
53. “So, that’s what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That’s what they needed. People were fools.” – Charles Bukowski
54. “People are not good to each other. Perhaps if they were our deaths would not be so sad.” – Charles Bukowski
Bukowski Quotes On Loneliness
Charles Bukowski was a writer who felt alive when he was writing his novel or poem. But still it was the loneliness his best friend where he felt comfortable to release his words.
Here are some Bukowski quotes about loneliness.
55. “There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.” – Charles Bukowski
56. “Being alone never felt right. Sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.” – Charles Bukowski
57. “I don’t like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.” – Charles Bukowski
58. “The whiskey and wine entered our veins when blood was too weak to carry on.” – Charles Bukowski
59. “The hangover was brutal but he didn’t mind. It told him he had been somewhere else, some place good.” – Charles Bukowski
60. “Drinking is another way of thinking, another way of living. It gives you two lives instead of one.” – Charles Bukowski
61. “I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn’t dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren’t thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.” – Charles Bukowski
62. “When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.” – Charles Bukowski
63. “Alcohol is probably one of the greatest things to arrive upon the earth – alongside of me.” – Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski Quotes On Art And Beauty
Charles Bukowski had an imagination that still blows our mind when we go through his novel and poem. So was his understanding about art and beauty as he was the craftman.
Here are some Charles Bukowski quotes on art and beauty.
64. “Great art is horses—t, buy tacos.” – Charles Bukowski
65. “The way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart.” – Charles Bukowski
66. “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
67. “An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.” – Charles Bukowski
68. “She was consumed by 3 simple things: drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more: youth and beauty.” – Charles Bukowski
69. “Beauty is nothing, beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it’s for something else.” – Charles Bukowski
70. “I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.” – Charles Bukowski
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Funny Charles Bukowski Quotes
Bukowski was arrogant but still was humorous when the story asked for it. Here are some funny Bukowski quotes.
71. “I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.” – Charles Bukowski
72. “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.” – Charles Bukowski
73. “‘Baby,’ I said, ‘I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me.” – Charles Bukowski
74. “People became so used to seeing s**t on film that they no longer realized it was s**t.” – Charles Bukowski
75. “If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.” – Charles Bukowski
76. “The first place smelled like work, so I took the second.” – Charles Bukowski
77. “I just want a hot cup of coffee, black, and I don’t want to hear about your troubles.” – Charles Bukowski
78. “If there are junk yards in hell, love is the dog that guards the gates.” – Charles Bukowski
79. “My ambition is handicapped by laziness.” – Charles Bukowski
80. “You can’t overestimate the stupidity of the general public.” – Charles Bukowski
81. “He was one of those who looked like a genius. I looked like a dishwasher so these types always pissed me off just a bit.” – Charles Bukowski
“82. Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.” – Charles Bukowski
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Bukowski Quotes On Politics
Charles Bukowski was also an influencer and motivational speaker. He certainly influenced many people who were his followers.
Here are some Charles Bukowski quotes on politics.
83. “The worst men have the best jobs, the best men have the worst jobs or are unemployed or locked in madhouses.” – Charles Bukowski
84. “I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.” – Charles Bukowski
85. “Some men hope for revolution but when you revolt and set up your new government you find your new government is still the same old papa, he has only put on a cardboard mask.” – Charles Bukowski
86. “Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste. It finally boiled down to a matter of who got the most votes. In the land of the moles, a mole was king.” – Charles Bukowski
87. “Are there good governments and bad governments? No, there are only bad governments and worse governments.” – Charles Bukowski
88. “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
89. “There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.” – Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski Quotes on Writing
90. “If I stop writing I am dead. And that’s the only way I’ll stop: dead.” – Charles Bukowski
91. “Without literature, life is hell.” – Charles Bukowski
92. “I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.” – Charles Bukowski
93. “Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.” – Charles Bukowski
94. “It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.” – Charles Bukowski
95. “Writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and afterward she gets up, goes to her purse, and gives me a handful of money.” – Charles Bukowski
96. “Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.” – Charles Bukowski
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Charles Bukowski Quotes One-Liner
97. “Our disappointment sits between us.” – Charles Bukowski
98. “I want to be with you. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.” – Charles Bukowski
99. “She’s mad but she’s magic. There’s no lie in her fire.” – Charles Bukowski
100. “Many a good man has been put under the bridge by a woman.” – Charles Bukowski
101. “Beautiful thoughts and beautiful women never last.” – Charles Bukowski
102. “What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.” – Charles Bukowski
103. “Beware those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone.“ – Charles Bukowski
104. “People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.” – Charles Bukowski
105. “If you want to know where God is, ask a drunk.” – Charles Bukowski
106. “The more crap you believe, the better off you are.” – Charles Bukowski
107. “I was an Agnostic. Agnostics didn’t have much to argue about.” – Charles Bukowski
108. “To be young is the only religion.” – Charles Bukowski
109. “Hey baby, when I write, I’m the hero of my s—t.” – Charles Bukowski
110. “Beware those who are always reading books.” – Charles Bukowski
111. “One can never be sure whether it’s good poetry or bad acid.” – Charles Bukowski
112. “Fiction is an improvement on life.” – Charles Bukowski
113. “Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.” – Charles Bukowski
114. “Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.” – Charles Bukowski
115. “It’s so easy to be a poet and so hard to be a man.” – Charles Bukowski
All these Bukowski quotes are the most famous and best saying from Charles. Life was a lesson for him, from how his childhood was affected to how he was treated during the war. Charles Bukowski quotes include politics, love, humanity, motivation, and women.
