Charles Bukowski Quotes
Heinrich Karl Bukowski
Born : August 16, 1920
Place of Birth : Andernach, Germany
Died : March 9, 1994
Place of death : San Pedro, California
Charles Bukowski was born in Germany in 1920 and came with his family to the United States when he was three years old. He grew up in poverty in Los Angeles, drifted extensively, and for much of his life made his home in. Bukowski had been a writer since childhood, published his first story at age twenty four, and began publishing poetry when he was thirty-five.
Charles Bukowski was a renowned American writer who was known almost as much for his drinking and womanizing as his poetry and novels. He wrote while working at the most menial jobs imaginable, but in his life wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually having over 60 books in print. It’s amazing that much of his material was ever published, since he moved around quite a bit and wrote so many short stories that he would simply mail and forget about. It’s doubtful that he even knew every bit of what he wrote, since he was very prolific indeed for many years.
During his youth Bukowski was shy and socially withdrawn, a condition exacerbated during his teens by an extreme case of acne. Neighborhood children ridiculed his German accent and the clothing his parents made him wear.
In his early teens Henry had an epiphany when he was introduced to alcohol by his friend William “Baldy” Mullinax, son of an alcoholic surgeon. “This [alcohol] is going to help me for a very long time,” he later wrote, describing the genesis of his chronic alcoholism; or, as he saw it, the genesis of a method he could utilize to come to more amicable terms with his own life.
After graduating from Los Angeles High School, Bukowski attended Los Angeles City College for two years, taking courses in art, journalism and literature.
On July 22, 1944, with World War II ongoing, Bukowski was arrested by FBI agents in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he was living at the time, on suspicion of draft evasion. He was held for 17 days in Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison. Sixteen days later he failed a psychological exam that was part of his mandatory military entrance “physical” and was given a Selective Service Classification of 4-F (unfit for military service).
Charles Bukowski Quotes
Since the main point of this site is to point out some of his greatest quotes, here are a few of them, many of my personal favorites.
“Some people never go crazy, what truly horrible lives they must live.”
“Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.”
“It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.”
“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.”
“I don’t like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.”
“If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.”
“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
“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.”
“If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose”
“Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.”
“It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.”
“Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”
“You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”
“There is a time to stop reading, there is a time to STOP trying to WRITE, there is a time to kick the whole bloated sensation of ART out on its whore-ass.”
“There are worse things than being alone,”
“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.”
“That is what friendship means. Sharing the prejudice of experience.”
“Well, people got attached. Once you cut the umbilical cord they attached to the other things. Sight, sound, sex, money, mirages, mothers, masturbation, murder, and Monday morning hangovers.”
Before you kill something make sure you have something better to replace it with; something better than political opportunist slamming hate horse shit in the public park.”