Charles Bukowski

I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.

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.

I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

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

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

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them; I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence.

Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you'll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There's nothing to get excited about. They just know. They're saviours.

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.

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

Mëso të mos e shkatërrosh me fjalë atë çfarë ke ndërtuar me heshtje.

If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it__ your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.

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

Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.

The writer has no responsibility other than to jack off in bed alone and write a good page.

A good writer knew when not to write. Anybody could type. Not that I was a good typist also I couldn't spell and I didn't know grammar. But I knew when not to write. It was like fucking. You had to rest the godhead now and then.

Yes?_ he asked, looking at me over the sheet.____ a writer temporarily down on my inspirations.___h, a writer, eh?___es.___re you sure?___o, I__ not.___hat do you write?___hort stories mostly. And I__ halfway through a novel.___ novel, eh?___es.___hat__ the name of it?____he Leaky Faucet of My Doom.____h, I like that. What__ it about?___verything.___verything? You mean, for instance, it__ about cancer?___es.___ow about my wife?___he__ in there too.