Here are the best quotes from Charles Bukowski, author of more than 50 works and a symbol of dirty realism and independent literature. His novels include Mailman, Factótum, Mujeres o Pulp.
Charles Bukowski was born on August 16, 1920 in Germany and died aged 73 in Los Angeles, a city that influenced most of his novels and poetry, bringing him into the public eye as a cursed writer.
You may also be interested in these phrases of great writers.
-What matters is how well you walk through fire.
-Some people never go crazy. What a horrible life they must have.
-We are here so that the teachings of the church, the state and the educational system disappear.
-Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.
-Life is kind if you let it be.
-How sad were those years, having the desire and the need to live but not having the ability.
-The problem with the world is that intelligent people are full of doubts while stupid people are those who have confidence in themselves.
-Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what suits you.
-Great writers are indecent people. They live unfairly, saving the best for paper.
-You have to die a few times before you can truly live.
That's the problem with the drink, I thought, as I poured myself a drink.
-When something bad happens, you drink to forget it; if something good happens, you drink to celebrate; and if nothing happens, you also drink so that something happens.
-Once a woman turns her back on you, forget her.
-They can see you dying in a gutter and they will pass you and spit on you.
-An intellectual says a simple thing in a complicated way. An artist says a complicated thing in a simple way.
-Of course it is possible to love other people if you don't know them well.
-Love? People don't want love; they want to succeed, and one of the things they can do is in love.
-I like to think of all those people who taught me things that I had never imagined before.
-We are here to kill the war. We are here to laugh at fate and live our life so well that death trembles upon receiving us.
-In the end we ended up crazy and alone.
"What I really needed was a bottle of beer with the wet label and those beautiful cold drops on the surface of the glass.
-The free soul is easily identified when you see it.
-Sometimes a man has to fight so much for life that he doesn't have time to live it.
-Almost always, the best thing in life is to do nothing at all, to spend time reflecting.
- It is an optimistic pessimism.
-Love burns with the first sun of reality.
-I was taught well. When that was so necessary, they showed me so many things that I never believed were possible.
-I must go, I don't know exactly why; I'm crazy I guess Goodbye.
-I had the feeling that I could fall into those eyes.
-Watch out for those looking for crowds.
-For yourself, not for fame or money, you have to continue.
-He never felt loneliness; the more separated from people he was, the better he felt.
-The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy, first you vote and then you receive orders. In a dictatorship, you don't have to waste time voting.
-It takes a lot of desperation, dissatisfaction and disappointment to write a few good poems.
-What counts is observing the walls.
-People don't want to work, people want to live well, but without working.
-People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they blow air with crooked straws.
-The difference between a brave person and a coward is that a coward thinks twice before jumping into the cage with a lion. The brave man simply does not know what a lion is.
-There are worse things than being alone, but it often takes decades to realize it and most of the time when you do it is too late.
-To find out who your friends are, have them put you in jail.
-When men control governments, we will be screwed.
-Knowledge, if you don't know how to apply it, is worse than ignorance.
-I can't stand the human being in his current state.
- Psychiatrists must have a term to designate that, I also have it for psychiatrists.
-My ambition is limited by my laziness.
-A man only takes problems out of thought.
-You start saving the world by saving a man.
-Anything can drive a man crazy because society is based on false bases.
-When I drank, the world was still out there, but for a moment it didn't have a hold on your neck.
-Examining your own mind is the worst thing a madman can do.
-There was a bit of music; then life seemed a little more pleasant, better.
-The well-balanced individual is crazy.
-It is incredible what a man has to do just to be able to eat, sleep and dress.
-Man was born to die.
-And there is also, of course, the madness and terror of knowing that some part of you is like a clock that cannot be wound again, once it stops.
-I just know that there are too many people with fear.
-When you are on the street is when you realize that everything has an owner.
-This is how democracy works: you take what you can, try to keep it and add something if possible.
-Dogs have fleas, people have problems.
-When love is an order, hatred can become a pleasure.
-This is also how the dictatorship works, only that one enslaves and the other destroys its disinherited.
-It's 4:30 in the morning. It is always 4:30 in the morning.
-A brave man is almost always a man without imagination.
-Our society we have formed with our lack of spirit.
-Play the violin. Dance the belly dance. Plant tulips in the rain. But don't write poetry.
-The pain was for me only like bad luck: I ignored it.
-That was all a man needed: hope.
-Loving people felt freer, but lacked the ability to feel or love.
-If you are losing your soul and you know it, then you have another soul to lose.
-We made love in the midst of sadness.
-The definition of life: problems.
-Most people go from nowhere to the grave with hardly the horror of life touching them.
-The greatest inventions of man are the bed and the atomic bomb: the first isolates you and the second helps you escape.
-When the spirit vanishes, the form appears.
-The computer is my new dildo. My writing has doubled in power and performance since I've had it.
-Another thing in this society is what hurts you.
-Education was the new divinity, and educated men the new powerful landowners.
-Fuck the truth. Style is more important: how to do each thing one by one.
- Where have the audiences that were able to choose and discriminate gone?
-Even at the racetrack I see horses running and it seems to me that it makes no sense.
- "Do you hate people?" "I don't hate them, I just feel better when they're not around."
-For those who believe in God, the most important questions have been answered. But for those who cannot accept God's formula, the important answers are not set in stone.
-We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, the state and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill in war.
-Sometimes you get out of bed in the morning and you think that you will not be able to do it, but you laugh inside because you remember all the times you have felt that way.
-I have never been alone. I have been in a room, I have felt suicidal, I have felt depressed, I have felt bad, but I have never felt that no one could enter the room and heal what was worrying me.
-I have never worried about loneliness because I have always had it as an itch. It's like being at a party or in a stadium full of people cheering for someone else.
-We are all gonna die. All of us, what a circus! That should make us love each other, but that doesn't happen. We are terrified of trivia. We let ourselves be eaten for nothing.
-If you're going to try, go all the way. If not, don't even try. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, and even your mind. It could keep you from eating for days… And it will be better than anything you've ever tried.
-You will be alone with the gods and the nights will burn with fire. You will ride through life towards the perfect laugh. It's the only fight that's worth it.
-Sweetie. Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it take all of you. Let it climb on your back and bring you down into nothingness. Let him kill you and eat your remains. Because everything will kill you and it is better to be killed for something you want.
-I wanted everyone or nothing.
-Some lose their minds and become soul, crazy. Some lose their souls and become intellectuals. Some lose both and are accepted.
-I love you as a man loves a woman he has never touched, about whom he only writes and of whom he keeps a photo.
- Being alone never felt right. Sometimes it felt good, but never adequate.
-I wanted to cry but the tears never came out. It was that kind of sadness, sick sadness, the one in which you can't feel worse. I think everyone goes through it every so often, but for me it's too often, too often.
Boring people all over the Earth, causing more boring people to spread. What a horror movie. The Earth is infested with them.
-Those who escape from hell never talk about it and, after having escaped, there is nothing to bother them afterwards.
-A love like that was a serious disease. A disease from which you never finish recovering.
-There is a tile in my heart that wants to come out but I am too strong for him. I tell him to stay there, because I won't let anyone see him.
-There is a place in the heart that is never filled. A space that even in the best of times will never be filled, and we will wait and wait in that space.
-Poetry is what happens when nothing else happens.
-It was true that he did not have much ambition, but there must be a place for people without ambition.
-People without morals consider themselves freer, but most lack the ability to feel or love.
-I stopped looking for the girl of my dreams, I just wanted one that wasn't a nightmare.
-The pain is strange. It is a cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire. The pain comes BANG! and sits on you. It is real. And to anyone who looks at you, you look like an idiot. Like you've suddenly gone dumb.
-There is no cure for pain unless you know someone who understands how you feel and knows how to help you.
-You don't have to mourn death, just as you don't have to feel sad about a growing flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives that people live or not.
-I'm a genius but nobody knows it apart from me.
-There is always a woman who saves you from another and, while she saves you, she prepares to destroy you.
-We are like roses that never cared to bloom when we should have bloomed and that the sun got tired of.
-The shortest distance between two points is usually unbearable.
-How can you say that you love someone when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you knew them?
-I went to the worst of the bars hoping they would kill me but all I could do was get drunk.
-Good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can continue creating art, become immortal. If you read this after I'm dead, then I made it.
- In general, I carry something to read so I don't have to see people.