"don't be ashamed of anything; I guess God meant it all like locks on doors."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Charles Bukowski quotes (page 36 of 41)
813 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I have loved you woman as surely as I have named you rust and sand and nylon."
Read quote
3 likes
"we drove on and on, past little villages and both good things and bad things were happening to the people in those villages too, but I still was nothing but arms and ears and eyes and maybe there'd be either some good luck for me or more death tomorrow."
Read quote
3 likes
"she was consumed by 3 simple things: drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more: youth and beauty"
Read quote
3 likes
"The apartment was built at the edge of a high cliff so that when you looked out the back window it seemed as if you were twelve floors up instead of four. It was very much like living on the edge of the world - a last resting place before the final big drop."
Read quote
3 likes
"WHEN YOU LEAVE YOUR TYPEWRITER YOU LEAVE YOUR MACHINE GUN AND THE RATS COME POURING THROUGH."
Read quote
3 likes
"Modern women ... they don't sew your pockets ... forget that."
Read quote
3 likes
"There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through."
Read quote
3 likes
"Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it."
Read quote
3 likes
"Daddy,' my mother asked, 'aren’t we going to run out of gas?' No there’s plenty of god-damned gas.' Where are we going?' I’m going to get some god-damed oranges!"
Read quote
3 likes
"They laughed. Things were funny. They weren't afraid to care. There was no sense to life, to the structure of things."
Read quote
3 likes
"I'm only interested in poetry."
Read quote
3 likes
"when the phone rings I too would like to hear words that might ease some of this."
Read quote
3 likes
"you are yesterday's bouquet so sadly raided"
Read quote
3 likes
"I'll use the knives for spreading jam, and the gas to warm my greying love."
Read quote
3 likes
"The wisdom to quit is all we have left."
Read quote
3 likes
"I didn't feel that way about it. I had been playing with death for some time. I can't say we were the best of friends but we were well acquainted."
Read quote
3 likes
"The human heart, as of course we all know is essentially good"
Read quote
3 likes
"I could scream down 90 mountains to less than dust if only one living human had eyes in the head and heart in the body, but there is no chance, my god, no chance. rat with rat dog with dog hog with hog, play the piano drunk listen to the drunk piano, realize the myth of mercy stand still as even a child's voice snarls and we have not been fooled, it was only that we wanted to believe."
Read quote
3 likes
"Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn't so."
Read quote
3 likes