"I would give anything for a female's hand on me tonight. they soften a man and then leave him listening to the rain."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Charles Bukowski quotes (page 30 of 41)
813 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The human body is mostly blood and mystery and sadness."
Read quote
3 likes
"I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell."
Read quote
3 likes
"i dunno," i said, "but i have an idea that people who don't think too much tend to look younger longer"
Read quote
3 likes
"Banion wondered which was worse - being sodomized by aliens, or having to sit through two hours of Charles Ives."
Read quote
3 likes
"my mother, poor fish, wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile! why don't you ever smile?" and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw"
Read quote
3 likes
"How are his poems?" "He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way."
Read quote
3 likes
"We are Born like this Into this Into these carefully mad wars Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness Into bars where people no longer speak to each other Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings Born into this Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes"
Read quote
3 likes
"a good book can make an almost impossible existence, liveable ( from 'the luck of the word' )"
Read quote
3 likes
"Alcohol is probably one of the greatest things to arrive upon the earth - alongside of me."
Read quote
3 likes
"If I stop writing I am dead. And that's the only way I'll stop: dead."
Read quote
3 likes
"it is good to be sitting some place in public at 2:30 in the afternoon without getting the flesh ripped from your bones."
Read quote
3 likes
"A man who can beat the horses can do anything he makes up his mind to do."
Read quote
3 likes
"...in that drunken place you would like to hand your heart to her and say touch it but then give it back."
Read quote
3 likes
"Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth."
Read quote
3 likes
"I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get."
Read quote
3 likes
"The human race had always disgusted me. essentially, what made them disgusting was the family-relationship illness, which included marriage, exchange of power and aid, which neighborhood, your district, your city, your county, your state, your nation-everybody grabbing each other's assholes in the Honeycomb of survival out of a fear-animalistic stupidity."
Read quote
3 likes
"The writing's easy, it's the living that is sometimes difficult."
Read quote
3 likes
"They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them."
Read quote
3 likes
"in the cupboard sits my bottle like a dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers. I drink and cough like some idiot at a symphony, sunlight and maddened birds are everywhere, the phone rings gamboling its sound against the odds of the crooked sea; I drink deeply and evenly now, I drink to paradise and death and the lie of love."
Read quote
3 likes