Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski
Henry Charles Bukowskiwas an American poet, novelist, and short story writer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth16 August 1920
CityAndernach, Germany
CountryUnited States of America
news newspapers happens
News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.
heart cigarette-smoke clerks
There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke and the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks never know that he's in there.
past magic common
The centuries are sprinkled with rare magic with divine creatures who help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us
hair long nightmare
He had long nostril hairs, powerfully intimidating, like an unscheduled nightmare.
nice men enough
It’s nice enough to make a man weep, but I don’t weep, do you?
lost wells
Well, we lost it, and that’s all there is to that.
mistake
It began as a mistake.
football lonely drinking
Women: I liked the colors of their clothing; the way they walked; the cruelty in some faces; now and then the almost pure beauty in another face, totally and enchantingly female. They had it over us: they planned much better and were better organized. While men were watching professional football or drinking beer or bowling, they, the women, were thinking about us, concentrating, studying, deciding - whether to accept us, discard us, exchange us, kill us or whether simply to leave us. In the end it hardly mattered; no matter what they did, we ended up lonely and insane.
choke
It’s when you hide things that you choke on them.
suicide jesus sleep
I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go. Suicide? Jesus Christ, just more work. I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn’t let me.
men discouraged needed
That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man.
night ifs dies
Some nights I knew that if I slept I would die.
children house normal
as a child i suppose i was not quite normal. my happiest times were when i was left alone in the house on a saturday.
jobs writing men
There were always men looking for jobs in America. There were always all these usable bodies. And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i.e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren't writers, or even cab drivers, and some men - many men - unfortunately aren't anything.