“The empty, the angry, the lonely, the tricked, we are all museums of fear.”
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Famous Charles Bukowski Quotes
Source: On Cats
“In New York you've got to have all the luck.”
Source: Notes of a Dirty Old Man
“Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.”
Source: The Captain is Out to Lunch
Source: The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected Poems 1951-1993
“I am aware that a computer can’t create a poem, but neither can a typewriter.”
Source: Il grande
“Keep your money in your pocket. Or bet it on a good horse.”
Source: On Writing
Source: Women
“I am a poem. There is no way out.”
Source: Selected Letters Volume 2: 1965-1970
“Don't ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.”
Source: Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters, 1963-1993
“Sometimes there's luck, When there is you stock up on it and wait for the other times”
“If there are junk yards in hell, love is the dog that guards the gates.”
“I am not like other people. I am burning in hell. The hell of myself.”
Source: New Poems Book Two
“I don’t understand people, never will. It looks like I got to travel pretty much alone.”
Source: The Bukowski Purdy letters: a decade of dialogue, 1964-1974
“The world is full of boring, identical and mindless people.”
“Those who escape hell however never talk about it and nothing much bothers them after that”
“I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.”
Source: Tales of Ordinary Madness
“Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself.”
Source: The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected Poems 1951-1993
“If you can't write the next line, well, you're dead. The past doesn't matter.”
“An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way”
Source: More Notes of a Dirty Old Man: The Uncollected Columns
Source: The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected Poems 1951-1993
“It’s nice enough to make a man weep, but I don’t weep, do you?”
Source: On Love
Source: Charles Bukowski: portions from a wine-stained notebook : uncollected stories and essays, 1944-1990
“I no longer want it all, just some comfort and some sex and some minor love.”
“I was beaten down long ago in some alley in another world.”
Source: The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected Poems 1951-1993
“Things will be far worse than they are now. And far better. I wait.”
Source: Tales of Ordinary Madness
Source: Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame
“Knowledge is knowing as little as possible.”
Source: Notes of a Dirty Old Man
Source: Tales of Ordinary Madness