72 Unforgettable Charles Bukowski Quotes (2022)

Henry Charles Bukowski was a German poet, novelist, columnist, and short story writer. He was born on August 16, 1920, his family moved to Los Angeles in 1930, where Charles spent most of his life. He was outspoken and explains his alcoholism, interaction with women, and portrayal of his life unapologetically.

His writing was deeply influenced by the social, cultural, and economic milieu of Los Angeles. Based on the lives of underprivileged Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the toil of work, his writing was recognized widely. He wrote 60 books based on thousands of poems, numerous short stories, and six novels. His renowned poetry includes Mockingbird wish me luck (1972), Love is a dog from hell (1977), War all the time (1984), and in 1896 he published You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense.

He wrote a column for an underground newspaper entitles “Notes of a Dirty Old man” which led to an FBI inquiry on him. His blunt attitude toward life made him say whatever he wants to. Just go through his quote about democracy by Charles Bukowski.

“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”. – Charles Bukowski

This quote was just a demo, now let us dig into his favorite (sarcastically of course) creature of the world “woman”.

Table of Contents

Women by Charles Bukowski

One of the most controversial books from Charles is his book Women; the Novel. According to critics, the book showed the chauvinist side of Charles and his negative thinking toward women.

His cruel humor in the novel bite many, let’s go through some of Charles Bukowski’s famous quotes from Women; the Novel.

30 Charles Bukowski Famous Quotes from Women; The Novel.

“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.” – Charles Bukowski
“being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.” – Charles Bukowski
“Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.” – Charles Bukowski
“People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.” – Charles Bukowski
“You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.” – Charles Bukowski
“I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, ‘I’m going to pee.’ hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking; talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes; the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3am; being told you snore; hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce; but always carring on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she’s now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; her dull friends; your dull friends; your drinking, her dancing; your flirting, her flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side and her doing the same; sleeping together” – Charles Bukowski
“And yet women-good women–frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.” – Charles Bukowski
“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.” – Charles Bukowski
“I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. On the other hand, when I got drunk I screamed, went crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn’t fit the other. I didn’t care.” – Charles Bukowski
“I was glad I wasn’t in love, that I wasn’t happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective. They lose their sense of humor. They become nervous, psychotic bores. They even become killers.” – Charles Bukowski
“Human relationships didn’t work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death–in a cesspool.” – Charles Bukowski
“Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.” – Charles Bukowski
“Human relationships were strange. I mean, you were with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stopped. Then there was a short period when you weren’t with anybody, then another woman arrived, and you ate with her and fucked her, and it all seemed so normal, as if you had been waiting just for her and she had been waiting for you. I never felt right being alone; sometimes it felt good but it never felt right.” – Charles Bukowski
“Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they’ll spit on you.” – Charles Bukowski
“I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn’t dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren’t thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.” – Charles Bukowski
“I was naturally a loner, content just to live with a woman, eat with her, sleep with her, walk down the street with her. I didn’t want conversation, or to go anywhere except the racetrack or the boxing matches. I didn’t understand t.v. I felt foolish paying money to go into a movie theatre and sit with other people to share their emotions. Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateur drunks, the bores.” – Charles Bukowski
“I think I need a drink.’ ‘Almost everybody does only they don’t know it.” – Charles Bukowski
“I never felt right being alone; sometimes it felt good but it never felt right.” – Charles Bukowski
“Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part -a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each other. People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no gamble or humor in their game -it was corpse fucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience down through the centuries. Some morals tended to keep people slaves in factories, in churches and true to the State. Other morals simply made good sense. It was like a garden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. You had to know which to pick and eat, which to leave alone.” – Charles Bukowski
“I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. It didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.” – Charles Bukowski
“Look, let me put it this way: with me, you’re number one and there isn’t even a number two.” – Charles Bukowski
“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.” – Charles Bukowski
“Don’t do it. Don’t love me.” – Charles Bukowski
“There’s no way I can stop writing, it’s a form of insanity.” – Charles Bukowski
“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.” – Charles Bukowski
“I was in love again. I was in trouble” – Charles Bukowski
“Everything is beautiful. We have all this beauty in the world and all we have to do is reach out and touch it, it is all there and all ours for the taking.” — Cecilia to Henry Chinaski, liberty taken changing past tense to present tense (173)” – Charles Bukowski
“Humanity, you never had it from the beginning.” That was my motto.” – Charles Bukowski
“A yet women -good women- frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep. Basically I craved prostitutes, base women, because they were deadly and hard and made no personal demands. Nothing was lost when they left. Yet at the same time I yearned for a gentle, good woman, despite the overwhelming price.” – Charles Bukowski
“She had wild eyes, slightly insane. She also carried an overload of compassion that was real enough and which obviously cost her something.” – Charles Bukowski

Sometimes writings of Charles make us feel that he was anti-everything. His quotes on love, loneliness, and life will blow your mind.

42 Charles Bukowski Quotes on Love and Life

“A love like this was a serious illness, an illness from which you cannot recover entirely.” – Charles Bukowski
“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.” – Charles Bukowski
“Some people never go crazy, what horrible lives they must lead.” – Charles Bukowski
“Find what you love and let it kill you.” – Charles Bukowski
“We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.” – Charles Bukowski
“I don’t hate people. I just feel better when they aren’t around.” – Charles Bukowski
“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.” – Charles Bukowski
“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.” – Charles Bukowski
“If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.” – Charles Bukowski
“To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.” – Charles Bukowski
“Of course it’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.” – Charles Bukowski
“You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.” – Charles Bukowski
“Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.” – Charles Bukowski
“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” – Charles Bukowski
“We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.” – Charles Bukowski
“some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about.” – Charles Bukowski
“I never met another man I’d rather be. And even if that’s a delusion, it’s a lucky one.” – Charles Bukowski
“I wasn’t a misanthrope and I wasn’t a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.” – Charles Bukowski
“I wasn’t lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could ﬁnd no meaning.” – Charles Bukowski
“I didn’t have any friends at school, didn’t want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to me.” – Charles Bukowski
“The area dividing the brain and the soul Is affected in many ways by experience — Some lose all mind and become soul: insane. Some lose all soul and become mind: intellectual. Some lose both and become: accepted.” – Charles Bukowski
“What is your advice to young writers?” “Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.” – Charles Bukowski
“regret is mostly caused by not having done anything.” – Charles Bukowski
“Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.” – Charles Bukowski
“My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.” – Charles Bukowski
“I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get.” – Charles Bukowski
“I have one problem, I don’t hate people. They disgust me and I want to get away from them. I do not have hatred. I have an escape mechanism.” – Charles Bukowski
“having nothing to struggle against they have nothing to struggle for.” – Charles Bukowski
“the worst thing,” he told me, “is bitterness, people end up so bitter.” – Charles Bukowski
“there’s no clarity. there was never meant to be clarity.” – Charles Bukowski
“There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.” – Charles Bukowski
“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.” – Charles Bukowski
“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. ” – Charles Bukowski
“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.” – Charles Bukowski
“Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.” – Charles Bukowski
“My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.” – Charles Bukowski
“The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it, there is not one who will resist.” – Charles Bukowski
“The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.” – Charles Bukowski
“I would be married, but I’d have no wife, I would be married to a single life.” – Charles Bukowski
“You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.” – Charles Bukowski
“Death is nothing, brother, it’s life that’s hard” – Charles Bukowski
“Dying in a war never stopped wars from happening.” – Charles Bukowski

Don’t try; The philosophy of Charles Bukowski

A gravestone of Charles states his life motto “Don’t try”, which gave a head scratch to his critics and followers. Charles doesn’t want people to give up, but he believes that if one wants to do something, he should just do it, it’s inside him that’s why he has the urge to do it. It’s already in you to get set free.

Charles does not believe people when they say they tried hard but failed.

Have a look at Charles’s quote on Don’t try.

“We work too hard. We try too hard,” Bukowski writes to Packard. “Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. Looking right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb.” He may have meant, as the video’s narrator puts it, that “if you have to try to try, if you have to try to care about something or have to try to want something, perhaps you don’t care about it, and perhaps you don’t want it.” And “if the thought of not doing the thing hurts more than the thought of potentially suffering through the process, if the thought of a life without it or never having tried it at all terrifies you, if it comes to you, through you, out of you, almost as if you’re not trying, perhaps Bukowski might say here, try, and ‘if you’re going to try, go all the way.’” That quote comes from Bukowski’s novel Factotum — the story of a writer in search of blue-collar work that won’t get in the way of his one true craft — and we might do well to take it one sentence further: “Otherwise, don’t even start.” – Charles Bukowski

Summary

Charles Bukowski was the hero of his world. People say he was a misogynist, sage, and an angry young man who is anti to everything. We leave this debate to you. Let us know what do you think about Charles as a person.