Charles Bukowski Quotes

“A spark can set a whole forest on fire. Just a spark. Save it.”

“Almost everyone is born a genius and buried an idiot.”

“An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.”

“Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.”

“Being alone never felt right. Sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.”

“Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life.”

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”

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

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

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

“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.”

“It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.”

“Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.”

“Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you.”

“Sex is interesting, but it’s not totally important. I mean it’s not even as important as excretion. A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement.”

“Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.”

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

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”

“The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.”

“The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.”

“The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn’t interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative.”

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”

“The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.”

“The world is full of boring, identical and mindless people.”

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

“Unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don’t do it.”

“We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”

“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.”

“When a hot woman meets a hermit one of them is going to change.”

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