Poems Charles Bukowski Quotes

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

some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about.

I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.

people run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.

so it's always a process of letting go, one way or another

I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get.

regret is mostly caused by not having done anything.

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

The Laughing Heart 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. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelous the gods wait to delight in you.

Beware Those Who Are ALWAYS READING BOOKS

Our disappointment sits between us.

I think that the world should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, just cats and rain, rain and cats, very nice, good night.

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

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.

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

Dying should come easy: like a freight train you don't hear when your back is turned.

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.

the worst thing," he told me, "is bitterness, people end up so bitter.

be it peace or happiness let it enfold you

and I laugh, I can still laugh, who can't laugh when the whole thing is so ridiculous that only the insane, the clowns, the half-wits, the cheaters, the whores, the horseplayers, the bankrobbers, the poets ... are interesting?

and love is a word used too much and much too soon.

a good book can make an almost impossible existence, liveable ( from 'the luck of the word' )

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

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

when we were kids laying around the lawn on our bellies we often talked about how we'd like to die and we all agreed on the same thing; we'd all like to die fucking (although none of us had done any fucking) and now that we are hardly kids any longer we think more about how not to die and although we're ready most of us would prefer to do it alone under the sheets now that most of us have fucked our lives away.

she wasn't very interesting but few people are.

girls please give your bodies and your lives to the young men who deserve them besides there is no way I would welcome the intolerable dull senseless hell you would bring me and I wish you luck in bed and out but not in mine thank you.

there's no clarity. there was never meant to be clarity.

and love was lightning and remembrance

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

people see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's great. an Academy Award means that you don't stink quite as much as your cousin.

I paid, got up, walked to the door, opened it. I heard the man say, "that guy's nuts." out on the street I walked north feeling curiously honored.

the gods seldom give but so quickly take.

it does seem the more we drink the better the words go.

she slammed the door and was gone. I looked at the closed door and at the doorknob and strangely I didn't feel alone.

the price of creation is never too high. the price of living with other people always is.

It is possible to be truly mad and to still exist upon scraps of life.

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

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

There is no hurry. Time means nothing to you.

but isn't there always one good thing to look back on? think of how many cups of coffee we drank together.

I was only photographing in words the reality of it all.

sometimes it's hard to know what to do.

we sat there smoking cigarettes at 5 in the morning.

I feel no grief for being called something which I am not; in fact, it's enthralling, somehow, like a good back rub

sometimes when everything seems at its worst when all conspires and gnaws and the hours, days, weeks years seem wasted – stretched there upon my bed in the dark looking upward at the ceiling i get what many will consider an obnoxious thought: it’s still nice to be Bukowski.

great books are the ones we need

And it seems people should not build houses anymore it seems people should stop working and sit in small rooms on second floors under electric lights without shades; it seems there is a lot to forget and a lot not to do and in drugstores, markets, bars, the people are tired, they do not want to move, and I stand there at night and look through this house and the house does not want to be built

I held her wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred, centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted. there was no creature living as foul as I and all my poems were false.

the gods play no favorites.

Tell him to seek the stars and he will kill himself with climbing.

well, death says, as he walks by, I'm going to get you anyhow no matter what you've been: writer, cab-driver, pimp, butcher, sky-diver, I'm going to get you

now it’s computers and more computers and soon everybody will have one, 3-year-olds will have computers and everybody will know everything about everybody else long before they meet them. nobody will want to meet anybody else ever again and everybody will be a recluse like I am now.

i am with the roots of flowers entwined, entombed sending up my passionate blossoms as a flight of rockets and argument; wine churls my throat, above me feet walk upon my brain, monkies fall from the sky clutching photographs of the planets, but i seek only music and the leisure of my pain

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

darkness falls upon Humanity and faces become terrible things that wanted more than there was. all our days are marked with unexpected affronts - some disastrous, others less so but the process is wearing and continuous. attrition rules. most give way leaving empty spaces where people should be. and now as we ready to self-destruct there is very little left to kill which makes the tragedy less and more much much more.

Angels, we have grown apart.

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

I was fairly poor but most of my money went for wine and classical music. I loved to mix the two together.

I found the best thing I could do was just to type away at my own work and let the dying die as they always have.

you are alone, Chinaski, and below the stage the seats are empty. the theatre is dark. why do you keep acting? what a bad habit.

you are yesterday's bouquet so sadly raided

Those who preach god, need god Those who preach peace do not have peace Those who preach love do not have love

all theories like cliches shot to hell, all these small faces looking up beautiful and believing; I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but believe is a graveyard. we have narrowed it down to the butcherknife and the mockingbird wish us luck.

Ya got cigarettes?” she asks. “Yes,” I say, “I got cigarettes.” “Matches?” she asks. “Enough to burn Rome.” “Whiskey?” “Enough whiskey for a Mississippi River of pain.” “You drunk?” “Not yet.

I will put on my shoes and shirt and get out of here - it'll be better for all of us.

I knew that I was dying. Something in me said, Go ahead, die, sleep, become as them, accept. Then something else in me said, no, save the tiniest bit. It needn't be much, just a spark. A spark can set a whole forest on fire. Just a spark. Save it.

I don't know if this is true to you but for me sometimes it gets so bad that anything else say like looking at a bird on an overhead power line seems as great as a Beethoven symphony. then you forget it and you're back again.

Love is not a candle burning down. Life is. And love and life are not the same or else Love, having choice, nobody would ever die.

I see a bright portion under the overhead light that shades into darkness and then into darker darkness and I can't see beyond that.

as long as there are human beings about there is never going to be any peace for any individual upon this earth (or anywhere else they might escape to). all you can do is maybe grab ten lucky minutes here or maybe an hour there. something is working toward you right now, and I mean you and nobody but you.

how can you be true and kind at the same time? how?

the world is better without them. only the plants and the animals are true comrades. I drink to them and with them.

I'm only interested in poetry.

How are his poems?" "He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.

most days go nowhere but the avoidance of pain and dissolution are lovely.

from the beginning, through the middle years and up to the end: too bad, too bad, too bad.

it is so dark now with the sadness of people they were tricked, they were taught to expect the ultimate when nothing is promised now young girls weep alone in small rooms old men angrily swing their canes at visions as ladies comb their hair as ants search for survival history surrounds us and our lives slink away in shame.

when I was a boy I used to dream of becoming the village idiot. I used to lie in bed and imagine myself the happy idiot able to get food easily ...and easy sympathy, a planned confusion of not too much love or effort. some would claim that I have succeeded.

all people start to come apart finally and there it is: just empty ashtrays in a room or wisps of hair on a comb in the dissolving moonlight.

when you're young a pair of female high-heeled shoes just sitting alone in the closet can fire your bones; when you're old it's just a pair of shoes without anybody in them and just as well.

in the cupboard sits my bottle like a dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers. I drink and cough like some idiot at a symphony, sunlight and maddened birds are everywhere, the phone rings gamboling its sound against the odds of the crooked sea; I drink deeply and evenly now, I drink to paradise and death and the lie of love.

the last cigarettes are smoked, the loaves are sliced, and lest this be taken for wry sorrow, drown the spider in wine. you are much more than simply dead: I am a dish for your ashes, I am a fist for your vanished air. the most terrible thing about life is finding it gone.

That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.

the people are the biggest horror show on earth, have been for centuries.

I'll use the knives for spreading jam, and the gas to warm my greying love.

when Whitman wrote, “I sing the body electric” I know what he meant I know what he wanted: to be completely alive every moment in spite of the inevitable. we can’t cheat death but we can make it work so hard that when it does take us it will have known a victory just as perfect as ours

about our argument tonight whatever it was about and no matter how unhappy it made us feel remember that there is a cat somewhere adjusting to the space of itself with a delightful wonderment of easiness. in other words magic persists without us no matter what we do against it.

unaccountably we are alone forever alone and it was meant to be that way, it was never meant to be any other way– and when the death struggle begins the last thing I wish to see is a ring of human faces hovering over me– better just my old friends, the walls of my self, let only them be there. I have been alone but seldom lonely. I have satisfied my thirst at the well of my self and that wine was good, the best I ever had, and tonight sitting staring into the dark I now finally understand the dark and the light and everything in between. peace of mind and heart arrives when we accept what is: having been born into this strange life we must accept the wasted gamble of our days and take some satisfaction in the pleasure of leaving it all behind. cry not for me. grieve not for me. read what I’ve written then forget it all. drink from the well of your self and begin again. Mind and Heart

nothing's news. it's the same old thing in disguise. only one thing comes without a disguise and you only see it once, or maybe never. like getting hit by a freight train. makes us realize that all our moaning about long lost girls in gingham dresses is not so important after all.

Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.

there was a soldier in the next room living with his wife and he would soon be going over there to protect me from Hitler so I snapped the radio off and then heard his wife say, "you shouldn't have done that." and the soldier said, "FUCK THAT GUY!" which I thought was a very nice thing for him to tell his wife to do. of course, she never did.

The dead do not need aspirin or sorrow, I suppose. but they might need rain. not shoes but a place to walk. not cigarettes, they tell us, but a place to burn. or we're told: space and a place to fly might be the same. the dead don't need me. nor do the living. but the dead might need each other. in fact, the dead might need everything we need and we need so much if we only knew what it was. it is probably everything and we will all probably die trying to get it or die because we don't get it. I hope you will understand when I am dead I got as much as possible.

I care for you, darling, I love you, the only reason I fucked L. is because you fucked Z. and then I fucked R. and you fucked N. and because you fucked N. I had to fuck Y. But I think of you constantly, I feel you here in my belly like a baby, love I'd call it, no matter what happens I'd call it love, and so you fucked C. and then before I could move you fucked W., so I had to fuck D. But I want you to know that I love you, I think of you constantly, I don't think I've ever loved anybody like I love you.

we are burning like a chicken wing left on the grill of an outdoor barbecue we are unwanted and burning we are burning and unwanted we are an unwanted burning as we sizzle and fry to the bone the coals of Dante's 'Inferno' spit and sputter beneath us and above the sky is an open hand and the words of wise men are useless it's not a nice world, a nice world it's not ...

sleeping in the rain helps me forget things like I am going to die and you are going to die and the cats are going to die but it's still good to stretch out and know you have arms and feet and a head, hands, all the parts, even eyes to close once more, it really helps to know these things, to know your advantages and your limitations, but why do the cats have to die, I think that the world should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, just cats and rain, rain and cats, very nice, good night.

The Blue Bird from The Last Night of the Earth Poems 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. there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke and the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks never know that he’s in there. there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay down, do you want to mess me up? you want to screw up the works? you want to blow my book sales in Europe? there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody’s asleep. I say, I know that you’re there, so don’t be sad. then I put him back, but he’s still singing a little in there, I haven’t quite let him die and we sleep together like that with our secret pact and it’s nice enough to make a man weep, but I don’t weep, do you?

I know a woman who keeps buying puzzles chinese puzzles blocks wires pieces that finally fit into some order. she works it out mathmatically she solves all her puzzles lives down by the sea puts sugar out for the ants and believes ultimately in a better world. her hair is white she seldom combs it her teeth are snaggled and she wears loose shapeless coveralls over a body most women would wish they had. for many years she irritated me with what I considered her eccentricities- like soaking eggshells in water (to feed the plants so that they'd get calcium). but finally when I think of her life and compare it to other lives more dazzling, original and beautiful I realize that she has hurt fewer people than anybody I know (and by hurt I simply mean hurt). she has had some terrible times, times when maybe I should have helped her more for she is the mother of my only child and we were once great lovers, but she has come through like I said 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. Frances, this poem is for you.

Yawn... I believe that I love sleep much more than anybody I’ve ever met. I have the ability to sleep for 2 or 3 days and nights. I will go to bed at any given moment. I often confused my girlfriends this way— say it would be about onethirty in the afternoon: “well, I’m going to bed now, I’m going to sleep…” most of them wouldn’t mind, they would go to bed with me thinking I was hinting for sex but I would just turn my back and snore off. this, of course, could explain why so many of my girlfriends left me. as for doctors, they were never any help: “listen, I have this desire to go to bed and sleep, almost all the time. what is wrong with me?” “do you get enough exercise?” “yes…” “are you getting enough nourishment?” “yes…” they always handed me a prescription which I threw away between the office and the parking lot. it’s a curious malady because I can’t sleep between 6 p.m. and midnight. it must occur after midnight and when I arise it can never be before noon. and should the phone ring say at 10:30 a.m. I go into a mad rage don’t even ask who the caller is scream into the phone: “WHAT ARE YOU CALLING ME FOR AT THIS HOUR!” hang up… every person, I suppose, has their eccentricities but in an effort to be normal in the world’s eye they overcome them and therefore destroy their special calling. I’ve kept mine and do believe that they have lent generously to my existence. I think it’s the main reason I decided to become a writer: I can type anytime and sleep when I damn well please.

I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny they are small, and the fountain is in France where you wrote me that last letter and I answered and never heard from you again. you used to write insane poems about ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you knew famous artists and most of them were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right, go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous because we’ never met. we got close once in New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never touched. so you went with the famous and wrote about the famous, and, of course, what you found out is that the famous are worried about their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed with them, who gives them that, and then awakens in the morning to write upper case poems about ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ told us, but listening to you I wasn’ sure. maybe it was the upper case. you were one of the best female poets and I told the publishers, editors, “ her, print her, she’ mad but she’ magic. there’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom, but that didn’ happen. your letters got sadder. your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. it didn’ help. you said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide 3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you I would probably have been unfair to you or you to me. it was best like this.