He wrote well over 5,000 short tales and poems, which a lot of people are unaware of. That alone gives us a glimpse into how his thinking operated and his drive to communicate his ideas to the world. Another thing Charles Bukowski is renowned for is showing his readers what a difficult life and culture he lived.
His writings concentrated on the deplorable conditions of American urban life, painting a vivid picture of how the present differs from the past. Discover more about Charles Bukowski by looking through the collection we’ve compiled for you below. List some of the quotes that spoke to you after finishing the article.
Famous Charles Bukowski Quotes to Inspire You
1. “Anything is a waste of time unless you are f*cking well or creating well or getting well or looming toward a kind of phantom-love-happiness.”
2. “It’s better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.”
3. “Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.”
4. “I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.”
5. “The best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them.”
6. “Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, ‘I’m not going to make it,’ but you laugh inside—remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.”
7. “Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don’t give a damn.”
9. “Beauty is nothing, beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it’s for something else.”
10. “Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.”
11. “Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others.”
12. “We must bring our own light to the darkness.”
13. “If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.”
14. “There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.”
15. “An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
16. “Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.”
Short Witty Charles Bukowski Quotes That’ll Make You Giggle
17. “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.”
18. “Love is kind of like when you see a fog in the morning when you wake up before the sun comes out. It’s just a little while, and then it burns away. Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.”
19. “We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us.”
21. “Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.”
22. “There is loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of a clock’s hand.”
23. “There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.”
24. “Death comes slowly like ants to a fallen fig.”
25. “Life’s as kind as you let it be.”
26. “People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.”
27. “Fiction is an improvement on life.”
28. “Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, and you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you’ll never meet them.”
29. “Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.”
30. “The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it. Basically, because you feel good—very goodwhen you are near or with them.”
31. “Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.”
32. “I would be married, but I’d have no wife. I would be married to a single life.”
33. “Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.”
Charles Bukowski Quotes on Love and Life
34. “A spark can set a whole forest on fire. Just a spark. Save it.”
35. “I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.”
36. “Death is nothing, brother. It’s life that’s hard.”
37. “You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”
38. “In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.”
39. “How the hell could a person enjoy being awakened at 6:AM, by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, sh*t, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
40. “Sadness is caused by intelligence. The more you understand certain things, the more you wish you didn’t understand them.”
41. “In the sun and in the rain, in the day and in the night, pain is a flower, pain is flowers, blooming all the time.”
42. “Being alone never felt right. Sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.”
43. “They disgust me—the way they wait for death with as much passion as a traffic signal.”
44. “You have to die a few times before you can really live.”
45. “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”
46. “No light goes out until it goes out. Let’s fight as men, not rats. Period.”
47. “Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.”
48. “Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.”
49. “A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.”
50. “Some lose all mind and become soul, insane. Some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual. Some lose both and become accepted.”
51. “If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.”
52. “When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.”
53. “It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.”
54. “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
55. “I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.”
56. “I wasn’t much for a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
57. “People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.”
58. “Your life is your life. Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. Be on the watch. There are ways out. There is a light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness.”
59. “Somebody asked me, ‘What do you do? How do you write—create?’ You don’t, I told them. You don’t try. That’s very important. Not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation, or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks, you make a pet out of it.”
60. “If I stop writing, I am dead. And that’s the only way I’ll stop—dead.”
61. “The less I needed, the better I felt.”
62. “If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery—isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”
What Kind of Life Do You Think Charles Bukowski’s Time Had? In the modern world, Charles Bukowski and his writings are still quite relevant. His statements’ frankness is a reflection of both what he has gone through and experienced in the past and what we are now dealing with today. From the outside, society can appear to have advanced and become better in many ways. But in truth, our communities’ core tenets remain virtually unchanged.
He demonstrated via his writings how individuals might protect themselves from harm and unpleasant feelings. Working the nine to five, as he put it, is like spending our brief lives on things that do not make us happy. There are innumerable options available to us; it is up to us to choose those we are confident will make us happy and give us meaning in life. Charles Bukowski also serves as a reminder that no emotion, whether pleasant or unpleasant, has a firm end. One moment we may feel like we are floating above the skies, and the next we may feel depressed. Be aware of this, resist the need to focus on the bad, and keep in mind that all sorrow will pass.
We trust that this collection of Charles Bukowski quotations has helped you learn some important lessons. Never give in to loneliness or social expectations. Remember that you are an independent being in charge of your own life! Have any of his books or poetry been read by you? Which quotations from Charles Bukowski are your favorites? Post your views about them below.
