Charles Bukowski

You don't know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it's for something else.

The world is full of boring, identical and mindless people.

My ambition is handicapped by laziness.

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

What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.

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

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.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.

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.

I lived so carefully, thinking someone was watching. But the stage was empty, the audience never came.

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.

People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.

I demand unconditional love and complete freedom. That is why I am terrible.

I am a genius but nobody knows it but me.

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.

Find what you love and let it kill you.

A good meal, a good talk, a good fuck--what better way to pass the day?

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

I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen, but as the years wasted on, nothing ever did unless I caused it.

All I want to do is sit on my ass all day and fart and think of Dante.

I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.

You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.

I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.

He loved books; books are cold but safe friends.

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

There are worse things than being alone.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.