Charles Bukowski

Knowledge is knowing as little as possible.

... to die on a kitchen floor at 7 o'clock in the morning while other people are frying eggs is not so rough unless it happens to you.

The streets were full of insane & dull people. Most of them lived in nice houses and didn't seem to work, and you wondered how they did it.

Hell, I'd even failed with women. Three wives. Nothing really wrong each time. It all got destroyed by petty bickering. Railing about nothing. Getting pissed-off over anything and everything. Day by day, year by year, grinding. Instead of helping each other you just sliced away, picked at this or that. Goading. Endless goading. It became a cheap contest. And once you got into it, it became habitual. You couldn't seem to get out. You almost didn't want to get out. And then you did get out. All the way.

A man needed somebody. There wasn't anybody around, so you had to make up somebody, make him up to be like a man should be. It wasn't make-believe or cheating. The other way was make-believe and cheating: living your life without a man like him around.

An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way

I knew it would be you

Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can't even cry.

But she projected vitality - you knew that she was there.

Careful poetry and careful people live only long enough to die safely.

Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

What were you going to do tonight?\' \'I was going to listen to the songs of Rachmaninoff.\' \'Who's that?\' \'A dead Russian.

My dear, Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it's much better to be killed by a lover. ~ Falsely yours

I didn't feel that way about it. I had been playing with death for some time. I can't say we were the best of friends but we were well acquainted.

Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.

I can almost understand why people leap from bridges.

she's mad, but she's magic.

love iz a big fat turkey and every day iz thanksgiving

I met a genius on the train today about 6 years old, he sat beside me and as the train ran down along the coast we came to the ocean and then he looked at me and said, it's not pretty.

Love is a horse with a broken leg trying to stand while 45,000 people watch.

people are not good to each other. perhaps if they were our deaths would not be so sad.

terror finally becomes almost bearable but never quite terror creeps like a cat crawls like a cat across my mind

Love breaks my bones and I laugh

like the fox I run with the hunted and if I'm not the happiest man on earth I'm surely the luckiest man alive.

People don't need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn't be.

There is light somewhere.

The human race had always disgusted me. essentially, what made them disgusting was the family-relationship illness, which included marriage, exchange of power and aid, which neighborhood, your district, your city, your county, your state, your nation-everybody grabbing each other's assholes in the Honeycomb of survival out of a fear-animalistic stupidity.

beware those quick to praise for they need praise in return beware those who are quick to censor they are afraid of what they do not know beware those who seek constant crowds for they are nothing alone beware the average man the average woman beware their love, their love is average seeks average

Sometimes I get too exhausted to even feel bad

I take much pleasure in being alone but there is also a strange warm grace in not being alone.