Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski

Poet, Novelist

Charles Bukowski was an American poet and novelist known for his raw, unfiltered portrayal of life, particularly in works like 'Ham on Rye' and 'Post Office.'

People Men Writing Thinking Drinking Running
Born
August 16, 1920
Died
March 9, 1994
Quotes
813
Rank
#20

Quote collection

Charles Bukowski quotes (page 22 of 41)

813 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Charles Bukowski Poet, Novelist
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"There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives ... their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.... Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die."

Death Country Flower
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"If you are going to try, go all the way or don't even start. If you follow it you will be alive with the gods. It is the only good fight there is."

Fighting Trying Alive
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"I am ashamed to be a member of the human race but I don't want to add any more to that shame, I want to scrape a little of it off."

Race Add Want
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"There were always men looking for jobs in America. There were always all these usable bodies. And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i.e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren't writers, or even cab drivers, and some men - many men - unfortunately aren't anything."

Jobs Writing Men
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"If you can hit a guy once, you can hit him twice."

Guy Ifs
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"All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was alway controlling who got a chance and who didn't."

Guy Chance Needed
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"Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others."

Needs Tools Censorship
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"I wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering."

Sleep Night People
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"LSD, yeah, the big parade – everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me."

Gun Sick Intellectual
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"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."

Baby Pockets Hello
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"Humanity, you never had it to begin with."

Reality Humanity
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"Her eyes always had a frantic, lost look. He could never cure her eyes of that."

Eye Looks Lost
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"Food is good for the nerves and the spirit. Courage comes from the belly – all else is desperation."

Nerves Spirit Desperation
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"And I said to myself that he was the first thing that I had ever missed in my life."

Firsts Said
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"My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people."

Heart Years People
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