Welcome to the wild world of Charles Bukowski, the unapologetic literary outlaw who turned the underbelly of American life into raw, gripping art. Bukowski, a novelist, poet, and short-story maestro, danced with words in the dimly lit corners of society, capturing the essence of alcoholics, the allure of sex workers, the despair of losing gamblers, and the rollercoaster of human relationships.
His pen was his scalpel, dissecting the mundane and the profound with equal gusto. A controversial figure? Absolutely. A misanthropic womanizer with a penchant for booze and cigarettes? Guilty as charged. But boring? Never. Beneath that rough exterior was a writer who could slice through life’s absurdities with a laugh, a grimace, and sometimes both. So, ready or not, here are the most unforgettable Bukowski quotes. Let’s see if Buk can make you smile, think, or maybe even squirm a bit.
Barstool Philosophies: Quick and sharp Bukowski quotes
1. “Beware those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone.“
2. “Beware the preachers, beware the knowers.”
3. “Find what you love and let it kill you.”
4. “You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”
5. “Dogs and angels are not very far apart.”
6. “If you want to know where God is, ask a drunk.”
7. “Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”
8. “People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.”
9. “Everything you own must be able to fit inside one suitcase; then your mind might be free.”
10. “An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
11. “To do a dull thing with style—now that’s what I call art.“
12. “To be young is the only religion.“
13. “If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.”
14. “Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.“
15. “Beware those who are always reading books.”
16. “Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.”
Humanity, Unfiltered: People through Bukowski’s eyes
1. “People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.“
2. “There are many things that bother me. I know that I have never passed a man on the street that I liked—most of them giving off a kind of ether of disgust and stumbling and clay-eating, snot-eating grievance. I don’t like the human race at all. this is my confessional, father, pass the wine.”
3. “Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
4. “I never met another man I’d rather be. And even if that’s a delusion, it’s a lucky one.“
5. “People diminish me;
the longer I sit and listen to them
the more empty I feel but I don’t get
the idea that they feel empty, I feel
that they enjoy the sound from their
mouths.”
6. “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.”
7. “Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.“
8. “You can forgive a fool because he only runs in one direction and doesn’t deceive anybody. It’s the deceivers who make you feel bad.”
9. “This is very important – to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you’re gonna lose everything…just to do nothing at all, very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That’s why they’re all totally mad, frustrated, angry and hateful.”
10. “People empty me. I have to get away to refill.“
11. “I am not a snob; it is simply that I am not interested with what most people have to say, or what they want to do — mostly with my time.“
12. “I don’t hate people, I just feel better when they aren’t around.”
13. “So, that’s what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That’s what they needed. People were fools.”
14. “I wasn’t a misanthrope and I wasn’t a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.“
15. “Only boring people get bored. They have to prod themselves continually in order to feel alive.”
Pain & the Poet: Bukowski on suffering and endurance
1. “When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.“
2. “Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.”
3. “I’ve had so many knives stuck into me, when they hand me a flower I can’t quite make out what it is. It takes time.”
4. “there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.“
5. “the tired sunsets and the tired
people –
it takes a lifetime to die and
no time at
all.”
6. “There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you.”
7. “There are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it’s too late
and there’s nothing worse
than too late.”
8. “I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can’t feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”
9. “It’s half-past nowhere everywhere.”
10. “I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but belief is a graveyard.“
11. “the history of melancholia
includes all of us.”
12. “It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.“
13. “I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.”
14. “There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.“
15. “I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.”
16. “Some nights I knew that if I slept I would die.”
17. “I was born to hustle roses down the avenue of the dead.”
18. “each man’s hell is in a different place:
mine is just up and behind
my ruined face.”
19. “Those who escape hell, however, never talk about it and nothing much bothers them after that.”
20. “I wasn’t lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could find no meaning.”
21. “Everything was eternally dreary, dismal, damned. Even the weather was insolent and bitchy.”
22. “I don’t know about other people, but when I wake up in the morning and put my shoes on, I think, Jesus Christ, now what?“
Love on the Rocks: Bukowski’s most unromantic romantic quotes
1. “Look, let me put it this way: with me, you’re number one and there isn’t even a number two.”
2. “I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”
3. “I want to be with you. It’s as simple, and as complicated as that.”
4. “in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.”
5. “Eyes. Those damn eyes f***ed me forever.”
6. “Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.”
7. “Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, 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.”
8. “the whole world is caught in her glance
and at last
the universe is
magnificent.”
9. “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.”
10. “I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.”
11. “She had wild eyes, slightly insane. She also carried an overload of compassion that was real enough and which obviously cost her something.”
12. “love be damned now
as love was damned when it
first arrived.”
13. “Love breaks my bones and I laugh.”
14. “If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.”
15. “A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.”
16. “…in that drunken place
you would
like to hand your heart to her
and say
touch it
but then
give it back.”
17. “She has hurt fewer people
than anybody I know,
and if you look at it like that,
well, she has created a better world.
she has won.”
18. “Love needs too much help.
Hate takes care of itself.”
19. “She’s mad but she’s magic. There’s no lie in her fire.”
20. “Love is a word
used too much
and much too soon.”
21. “Don’t do it. Don’t love me.”
22. “Of course it’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.”
SEE ALSO: The Most Beautiful Love Quotes from Literature
The Laughing Heart: Optimism with a Bukowski twist
1. “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.“
2. “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.“
3. “A spark can set a whole forest on fire. Just a spark. Save it.”
4. “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.”
5. “If you’re going to try, go all the way. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe 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.“
6. “There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on. Yet most people are stricken with fear. They fear failure so much that they fail. They are too conditioned, too used to being told what to do. It begins with the family, runs through school and goes into the business world.”
7. “It’s a f**k you world. Well, keep it going anyhow, what the hell.”
8. “Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.”
9. “Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
don’t swim in the same slough.
Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself
and stay out of the clutches of mediocrity.“
10. “Yes, the real miracles are the thousands of tiny people who know exactly what they are doing. I used to look for inspiration in higher places but the higher you go, like to Plato or God, the less space there is in which to stand.”
11. “If you persisted long enough, the good luck usually came. Most people couldn’t wait on the luck, though, so they quit.”
12. “Wherever the crowd goes, run in the other direction. They’re always wrong.“
13. “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.“
14. “some moments are nice, some are
nicer, some are even worth
writing
about.”
15. “Once in a rare lifetime have you ever been in a roomful of people who only helped you when you looked at them, listened to them. this was one of those magic times. I knew it.”
16. “Stop insisting on clearing your head — clear your f**king heart instead.”
17. “The less I needed, the better I felt.”
“be it peace or happiness
let it enfold you”
18. “We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.“
19. “That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man.”
Midnight Musings: Bukowski on life and death
1. “Death is nothing, brother, it’s life that’s hard.”
2. “My whole life has been a matter of fighting for one simple hour to do what I want to do.”
3. “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.”
4. “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.”
5. “We waited and waited. All of us. Didn’t the shrink know that waiting was one of the things that drove people crazy? People waited all their lives. They waited to live, they waited to die. They waited in line to buy toilet paper. They waited in line for money. And if they didn’t have any money they waited in longer lines. You waited to go to sleep and then you waited to awaken. You waited to get married and you waited to get divorced. You waited for it to rain, you waited for it to stop. You waited to eat and then you waited to eat again. You waited in a shrink’s office with a bunch of psychos and you wondered if you were one.”
6. “Youth, you son of a b**ch, where did you go?”
7. “You have to die a few times before you can really live.”
8. “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.”
9. “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”
10. “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.”
11. “Life’s as kind as you let it be.”
12. “You’ve got to burn straight up and down and then maybe sidewise for a while and have your guts scrambled by a bully and the demonic ladies, you’ve got to run along the edge of madness teetering, you’ve got to starve like a winter alleycat, you’ve go to live with the imbecility of at least a dozen cities, then maybe maybe maybe you might know where you are for a tiny blinking moment.”
13. “For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. 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.”
14. “I wasn’t much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
15. “I wasn’t going anywhere and neither was the rest of the world. We were all just hanging around waiting to die and meanwhile doing little things to fill the space. Some of us weren’t even doing little things. We were vegetables.“
16. “People are not good to each other.
perhaps if they were
our deaths would not be so sad.”
17. “I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: “Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I’ll be ready.”
Hope you had as much fun exploring Buk’s world through his quotes as I did curating them! Don’t forget to share, and of course, check out our other quote collections for more literary magic. Catch you there!
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