Quotes by Charles Bukowski

Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.

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.

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

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

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

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.

A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.

"Do you hate people?"
"I don't hate them... I just feel better when they're not around."

My ambition is handicapped by laziness.

'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.

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.

Education also seemed to be a trap. The little education I had allowed myself had made me more suspicious. What were doctors, lawyers, and scientists? They were just men who allowed themselves to be deprived of their freedom to think and act as individuals.

It's necassary for me sometimes just to be alone and quiet and doing nothing.

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

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

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

This is presented as a work of fiction and dedicated to nobody.

She was consumed by 3 simple things:
drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more:
youth and beauty.

That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man.

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.

Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.

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

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.