"too often, the only escape is sleep"
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Quote collection
Charles Bukowski quotes (page 19 of 41)
813 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You can steal my women but don't play with my whiskey."
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"there is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy"
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"To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane."
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"Most of the world was mad. And the part that wasn't mad was angry. And the part that wasn't mad or angry was just stupid. I had no chance. I had no choice. Just hang on and wait for the end. It was hard work. It was the hardest work imaginable."
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"Why do you insist upon destroying yourself?"
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"Somebody at one of these places asked me: "What do you do? How do you write, create?" You don't, I told them. You "don't try". That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like it's looks, you make a pet out of it."
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"They were beautiful nothings"
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"one can never be sure whether it's good poetry or bad acid"
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"For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter."
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"Everything was a trap: women, drugs, whiskey, wine, scotch, beer - even beer - cigars, and cigarettes. Traps: Work or no work. Traps: Artistry or no artistry; everything sucked you into some spiderweb. I disdained the use of the needle for the same reason that I disdained some so-called beautiful women - the price was far beyond the measure of the worth. I didn't want to hustle that hard."
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"I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future."
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"Women: I liked the colors of their clothing; the way they walked; the cruelty in some faces; now and then the almost pure beauty in another face, totally and enchantingly female. They had it over us: they planned much better and were better organized. While men were watching professional football or drinking beer or bowling, they, the women, were thinking about us, concentrating, studying, deciding - whether to accept us, discard us, exchange us, kill us or whether simply to leave us. In the end it hardly mattered; no matter what they did, we ended up lonely and insane."
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"you are on the freeway threading through traffic now, moving both towards something and towards nothing at all as you punch the radio on and get Mozart, which is something, and you will somehow get through the slow days and the busy days and the dull days and the hateful days and the rare days, all both so delightful and so disappointing because we are all so alike and so different."
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"love be damned now as love was damned when it first arrived."
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"The centuries are sprinkled with rare magic with divine creatures who help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us"
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"I feel no grief for being called something which I am not; in fact, it's enthralling, somehow, like a good back rub"
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"That's your response to everything: drink?" "No, that's my response to nothing."
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"...maybe a damned good night's sleep will bring me back to a gentle sanity. But at the moment, I look about this room and, like myself, it's all in disarray: things fallen out of place, cluttered, jumbled, lost, knocked over and I can't put it straight, don't want to. Perhaps living through these petty days will get us ready for the dangerous ones."
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"I only want sweet peace and kindliness when I awaken -- but there's always some finger pointing, telling me some terrible deed I committed during the night. It seems I make a lot of mistakes and it seems that I am not allowed any."
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