A List of the Best Charles Bukowski Quotes

featured, people, writing
A List of the Best Charles Bukowski Quotes

A List of the Best Charles Bukowski Quotes

featured, people, writing

Charles Bukowski is one of my favorite writers. I love his raw, honest style of writing and clear, straight-to-the-point tone of voice. My favorite Charles Bukowski novel is Ham On Rye, although I love Post Office, too. And my favorite book of poetry by Charles Bukowski is Love Is A Dog From Hell. Over the years, I’ve gathered a list of my favorite, best Charles Bukowski quotes for your reading pleasure. Quotes about drinking (his favorite hobby), quotes about love and relationships, & quotes about life in general.

My list of the best Charles Bukowski quotes:

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.

— Charles Bukowski

Practice- that’s all it took. All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was always controlling who got a chance, & who didn’t.

— Charles Bukowski, Ham On Rye

He taught me the meaning of pain. Pain without reason.

— Charles Bukowski, Ham On Rye

she was consumed by 3 simple things:
drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more:
youth and beauty

— Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers At Last

If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.

— Charles Bukowski

I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.

— Charles Bukowski, An Almost Made Up Poem

We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.

— Charles Bukowski

Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski, Women

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.

— Charles Bukowski

I don’t care what they say after I’m dead. In fact, I hardly care what they say while I’m alive. I only write to help myself get through the weeks and the months and the years.

— Charles Bukowski

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

— Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

I hated them because they had something I had not yet had, and I said to myself, I said to myself again, someday I will be as happy as any of you, you will see.

— Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

We sat on a park bench and chewed the gum and I thought, well, now I have found something, I have found something that is going to help me, for a long time to come. The park grass looked greener, the park benches and the flowers were trying harder.

— Charles Bukowski, Ham On Rye

beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone

— Charles Bukowski, The Genius of the Crowd

Love breaks my bones
and I laugh

— Charles Bukowski

The tigers have found me and I do not care.

— Charles Bukowski, For Jane

Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.

— Charles Bukowski

A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.

— Charles Bukowski

I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.

— Charles Bukowski

I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.

— Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun.

— Charles Bukowski, Factotum

In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.

— Charles Bukowski, Post Office

She’s mad, but she’s magic. There’s no lie in her fire.

— Charles Bukowski, An Almost Made Up Poem

Nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. It’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.

— Charles Bukowski

So it’s always a process of letting go, one way or another.

— Charles Bukowski

nothing can save
you
except
writing.
it keeps the walls
from
failing.

— Charles Bukowski

He asked, “What makes a man a writer?” “Well,” I said, “it’s simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.”

— Charles Bukowski

your letters got sadder. your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. it didn’t help. you said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over the river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you.

— Charles Bukowski, An Almost Made Up Poem

Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don’t give a damn.

— Charles Bukowski

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

— Charles Bukowski

It was a joy! Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.

— Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?

— Charles Bukowski, Post Office

Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.

— Charles Bukowski

There is a place in the heart that will never be filled; a space. And even during the best moments, and the greatest times, we will know it.

— Charles Bukowski

The less I needed, the better I felt.

— Charles Bukowski

I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.

— Charles Bukowski

I guess we often get the deep blues, both of us, and wonder what it all means – the people, the buildings, the day by day things, the waste of time, of ourselves.

— Charles Bukowski

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

— Charles Bukowski

Love breaks my bones & i laugh.

— Charles Bukowski

I don’t hate people, I just feel better when they aren’t around.

— Charles Bukowski

Without literature, life is hell.

— Charles Bukowski


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