Charles Bukowski quote: "the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and the men drink too much and nobody finds the one but keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh."

Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you'...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exac...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

the way to create art is to burn and destroy
ordinary concepts and to substitute them
with...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

In the old days, before I was married, or knew a lot of women, I would just pull down all the shades...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

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

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowe...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

when I am feeling
low
all i have to do is
watch my cats
and my
courage
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. neither do I. maybe that's why we get along
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

There's nothing like privacy. You know, I like people. It's nice that they might like my books and a...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each d...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I've never been lonely. I've been in a room -- I've felt suicidal. I've been depressed. I've felt aw...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I wish to weep
but sorrow is
stupid.
I wish to believe
but belief is a
grav...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

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

Find what you love and let it kill you.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

My dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you.
Let it drain you of your all. Let it clin...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

That is what friendship means. Sharing the prejudice of experience.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

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

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show yo...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The whole LSD, STP, marijuana, heroin, hashish, prescription cough medicine crowd suffers from the W...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Well, people got attatched. Once you cut the umbilical cord they attatched to the other things. Sigh...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I killed four flies while waiting. Damn, death was everywhere. Man, bird, beast, reptile, rodent, in...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part -a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, c...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Never get out of bed before noon
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don'...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you'll live 10 times lo...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, 'Don't try.' That fits th...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

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

when we were kids
laying around the lawn
on our
bellies

we often talked CHARLES BUKOWSKI

We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

we
sat there
smoking
cigarettes
at
5
in the morning.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

What is your advice to young writers?”
“Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't writ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The Genius Of The Crowd

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the avera...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lo...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

you boys can keep your virgins
give me hot old women in high heels
with asses that forgo...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The telephone is needed for
Emergency purposes only
These people are not
Emergencies,...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love wha...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him ou...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shak...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

and our few good times will be rare because we have the critical sense
and are not easy to fool...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I do not like the human race. I don't like their heads, I don't like their faces, I don'...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from other...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. T...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good,...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I heard an airplane passing overhead. I wished I was on it.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips y...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

my mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, sta...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

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

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I care for you, darling, I love you,
the only reason I fucked L. is because you fucked
Z. ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

She's mad, but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfrie...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I'd decided the campus was just a place to hide. There were some campus freaks who stayed on forever...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

It was better for me when I could imagine greatness in others, even if it wasn't always there.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

what matters most is how well you walk through the fire
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Look, let me put it this way: with me, you’re number one and there isn’t even a number two.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I don't write so much now. I'm getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it d...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll sho...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the loc...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

people see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's g...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Of course it's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
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

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of every...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men w...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulatio...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

To do a dull thing with style-now THAT'S what I call art.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or poli...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

people diminish me;
the longer I sit and listen to them
the more empty I feel but I don't...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. T...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

A i urreni njerëzit?
Unë nuk i urrej ata ... Unë vetëm ndjehen mirë kur ata nuk janë për...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don't want it smoothed out.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything y...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

What a pitiful mass of dangerous nothing
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

there's no release, just gurus and self- appointed gods and hucksters. the more people say, the less...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I'm too careless. I don't put out enough effort. I'm tired.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

it doesn't matter if Prince Charles falls off his horse
or that the hummingbird is so seldom CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even during the day ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into th...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled

a space

and even ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

now it’s computers and more computers
and soon everybody will have one,
3-year-olds will...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Beasts bounding through time.

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway tes...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

dogs and angels are not
very far apart
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I didn't have any friends at school, didn't want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench an...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continu...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

they simply never understand,
do they,
that sometimes solitude
is
one of the mos...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

great writers are indecent people
they live unfairly
saving the best part for paper.
...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
t...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

My flesh looked like it wasn't trying. It looked like it hated being part of me.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Style is the answer to everything.
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing
To do...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

You women have more holes than swiss cheese.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I'm becoming softer and softer.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

y la fama y el amor
nada más que un truco para atenuar nuestra herida.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Uno se puede encariñar de muchas cosas aparte del sexo pero es mejor si el sexo está presente de a...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

las palabras bonitas
como las mujeres bonitas
se arrugan y mueren.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this CHARLES BUKOWSKI

your best men are
drunks and your worst men are
locking them
up,
your best men a...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

there was something about
that city, though
it didn't let me feel guilty
that I had n...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

we must bring
our own light
to the
darkness.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Thirty- eight years old and he was finished. He sipped at the coffee and remembered where he had gon...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I wanted the whole world or nothing.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

You have to die a few times before you can really
live.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

My ambition is handicapped by laziness
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I went to the kitchen and felt-up the turkey.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure ad moving on. Yet most people a...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Well it’s good to have a car like that, once in a while somebody’ll say, ‘why don’t you come...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women, it is because of these who I met were that. Th...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

having nothing to struggle
against
they have nothing to struggle
for.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

There is a time to stop reading, there is a time to STOP trying to WRITE, there is a time to kick th...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn't a nightmare.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The place trembled with sound. I didn't need to do anything. They would do it all. But you had to be...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

You're afraid of the audience, aren't you?"
"Yes, but it's not stagefright. It's that I'm there...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important. I mean it's not even as important (physically) a...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Before you kill something make sure you have something better to replace it with; something better t...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

There are worse things than being alone,
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show....
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

that your power of command
with simple language was
one of the magnificent things of
...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Cats tell me without effort all that there is to know.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I
think that the
world should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, just
cats...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly matter...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

girls
please give your
bodies and your
lives
to
the young men
who
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

We’ve all heard that little woman who says, “Oh, it’s terrible what these young people do to t...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

- I tak nieźle sobie pożyłem.
- Co to za życie? – powiedział ojciec.- Nic tylko kłamstw...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I guess I´m too used to sitting in a small room and making
words do a few things. I see enoug...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

So be careful when you bend over.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

as long as there are
human beings about
there is never going to be
any peace
for...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I have, he went on, betrayed myself with
belief, deluded myself with love
tricked myself w...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

is there any wonder why the world is where it’s at now? just notice the creature sitting near you ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

they thought that writing had
something to do with
the politics of the
thing.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

it’s as if he were hiding in there and I want to console him, say: “I am sorry, poor fellow, but...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

it is a fine sunny day and great matters loom across the horizon of history. Carthage in my rearview...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

another hot summer night as I sit here and play at being a writer again. and the worst thing of cour...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Living too long takes more than time
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

humanity you sick motherfucker.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I look like a man in a death camp.
I
am.

still, I'm lucky: I feat on solitude, ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Writing is its own intoxication.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

if I had a book or a drink then I didn’t think too much of other things—fools create their own p...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

But you know, my former life as a bibliophile, it possibly kept me from murdering somebody, myself i...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

alone tonight in this house, alone with 6 cats who tell me without effort all that there is to know.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

a bird no one wants. he’s mine. my bird of pain. he doesn’t sing. that bird swaying on the bough...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

of one hundred movies there's one that is fair, one that's good and ninety eight that are very bad. ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

people are worn away with striving, they hide in common habits. their concerns are herd concerns. fe...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

death is walking
up and down
this room
smoking my cigars
taking hits of my <...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

there was a soldier in the next room living with his wife and he would soon be going over there to p...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I was so thin I could slice bread with my shoulderblades, only I seldom had bread
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

well, death says, as he walks by, I'm going to get you anyhow no matter what you've been: writer, ca...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

not writing is not good but trying to write when you can't is worse.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

great books are the ones we need
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

young or old, good or bad, I don't think anything dies as slow and as hard as a writer.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

I often carry things to read
so that I will not have to look at
the people.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Now we are citizens of nothing. the sun itself knows the sad truth of how we surrendered our lives a...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

Charles Bukowski

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