Charles Bukowski Quotes (1920-1994)

“LSD, yeah, the big parade — everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me.”

“There ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved.”

“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.”

“I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me.”

“I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead: men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideals.”

“he asked, "who wrote those?" "you did," he was told. "ah," he responded, "its as I have always suspected: death then does have some virtue."”

“Then one day [i.e. while in the Los Angeles Public Library] I pulled a book down and opened it, and there it was. I stood for a moment, reading. Then like a man who had found gold in the city dump, I carried the book to a table. The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humour and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity. The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me. I had a library card. I checked the book out, took it to my room, climbed into my bed and read it, and I knew long before I had finished that here was a man who had evolved a distinct way of writing. The book was Ask the Dust and the author was John Fante. He was to be a lifetime influence on my writing.”

“Post Office by Charles Bukowski is the book I refer to when I want to confront the narrative voice at its barest, most honest, most unflattering—and most winning.”