Charles Bukowski Quotes

Never get out of bed before noon.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.

To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.

My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don’t want it smoothed out.

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.

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.

Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.

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.

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?

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

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.