Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was a German-born American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. His work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. {more}
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“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
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“Do you hate people?
I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
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“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.”
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“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
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“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.”
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“You have to die a few times before you can really live.”
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“That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”
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“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
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“If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose”
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“Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.”
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“I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”
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“Being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.”
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“Find what you love and let it kill you.”
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“A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.”
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“Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.”
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“Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”
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“Of course it's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.”
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“People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.”
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“The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.”
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“We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting”
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“You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”
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“I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.”
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“Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It's like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss.”
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“I never met another man I'd rather be. And even if that's a delusion, it's a lucky one.”
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“You son of a bitch, she said, I am trying to build a meaningful relationship. You can't build it with a hammer, he said.”
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“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.”
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“The trouble with a mask is it never changes.”
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“I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: "Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I'll be ready.”
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“In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.”
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“If you get married they think you're finished and if you are without a woman they think you're incomplete.”
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“The fuckers. There, I feel better. God-damned human race. There, I feel better.”
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“Any asshole can chase a skirt, art takes discipline.”
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“It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.”
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“It's better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.”
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“The more crap you believe, the better off you are.”
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“He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.”
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“Nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. it’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.”
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“If you are going to try, go all the way or don't even start. If you follow it you will be alive with the gods. It is the only good fight there is.”
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“I don't know about other people, but when I wake up in the morning and put my shoes on, I think, Jesus Christ, now what?”
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“There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.”
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“Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don’t give a damn.”
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“Oh, I don’t mean you’re handsome, not the way people think of handsome. Your face seems kind. But your eyes - they’re beautiful. They’re wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a forest on fire.”
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“Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them: like you they have not escaped.”
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“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.”
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“People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they are sucking wind through bent straws.”
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“You have my soul and I have your money.”
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“It began as a mistake.”
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“I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.”
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“There is a place in the heart that will never be filled; a space. And even during the best moments, and the greatest times, we will know it.”
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“Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life.”
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“I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.”
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“Animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. neither do I. maybe that's why we get along”
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“Bad taste makes more millionaires than good taste.”
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“Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important. I mean it's not even as important (physically) as excretion. A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement.”
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“In the old days, before I was married, or knew a lot of women, I would just pull down all the shades and go to bed for three or four days. I'd get up to shit. I'd eat a can of beans, go back to bed, just stay there for three or four days. Then I'd put on my clothes and I'd walk outside, and the sunlight was brilliant, and the sounds were great. I felt powerful, like a recharged battery. But you know the first bring-down? The first human face I saw on the sidewalk, I lost half my charge right there.”
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“The less I needed, the better I felt.“
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“Most people are not ready for death, theirs or anybody elses.”
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“I’ve had so many knives stuck into me, when they hand me a flower I can’t quite make out what it is. It takes time.”
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“Some men never die and some men never live but we're all alive tonight.”
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“When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.”
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