Charles Bukowski Quotes

If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. If you’re going to try, go all the way. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe your mind. Go all the way. It could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail, it could mean derision, mockery, isolation. Isolation is the gift, all the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And you’ll do it despite rejection and the worst odds and it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods and the nights will flame with fire. Do it, do it, do it. Do it. All the way. All the way. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter, It’s the only good fight there is.

When a hot woman meets a hermit one of them is going to change.

Sometimes a man doesn’t know what to do about things and sometimes it’s best to lie very still and try not to think at all about anything.

Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you’ll never meet them.

Life’s as kind as you let it be.

There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.

The history of melancholia includes all of us.

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it, basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.

The difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable.

Something else is hurting you – that’s why you need pot or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so f***ing loud you can’t think.

Some men never die and some men never live but we’re all alive tonight.

One can never be sure whether it’s good poetry or bad acid.