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“I don't hate people. I just feel better when they aren't around.”
― Bukowski, Charles

“I always had this certain
contentment-
I wouldn't call it
happiness-
it was more of an inner
balance
that settled for
whatever was occurring”
― Charles Bukowski

“He has a golf swing like a Bukowski line. It's slightly rough, but it's got a shape that knifes through time.”
― Jarod Kintz, To be good at golf you must go full koala bear

“You realize when you’re
plucked out of the mainstream that
it doesn’t need you or
anybody else.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Damned

“The less i needed the better i felt".”
― Charles Bukowski

“I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn't particularly want money. I didn't know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. The thought of being something didn't only appall me, it sickened me. The thought of being a lawyer or a councilman or an engineer, anything like that, seemed impossible to me. To get married, to have children, to get trapped in the family structure. To go someplace to work every day and to return. It was impossible. To do things, simple things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor, Mother's Day . . . was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep.

My father had a master plan. He told me, "My son, each man during his lifetime should buy a house. Finally he dies and leaves that house to his son. Then his son gets his own house and dies, leaves both houses to his son. That's two houses. That son gets his own house, that's three houses . . ."

The family structure. Victory over adversity through the family. He believed in it. Take the family, mix with God and Country, add the ten-hour day and you had what was needed.

I looked at my father, at his hands, his face, his eyebrows, and I knew that this man had nothing to do with me. He was a stranger. My mother was non-existent. I was cursed. Looking at my father I saw nothing but indecent dullness. Worse, he was even more afraid to fail than most others. Centuries of peasant blood and peasant training. The Chinaski bloodline had been thinned by a series of peasant-servants who had surrendered their real lives for fractional and illusionary gains. Not a man in line who said, "I don't want a house, I want a thousand houses, now!"

He had sent me to that rich high school hoping that the ruler's attitude would rub off on me as I watched the rich boys screech up in their cream-colored coupes and pick up the girls in bright dresses. Instead I learned that the poor usually stay poor. That the young rich smell the stink of the poor and learn to find it a bit amusing. They had to laugh, otherwise it would be too terrifying. They'd learned that, through the centuries. I would never forgive the girls for getting into those cream-colored coupes with the laughing boys. They couldn't help it, of course, yet you always think, maybe . . . But no, there weren't any maybes. Wealth meant victory and victory was the only reality.

What woman chooses to live with a dishwasher?”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham On Rye

“La gente debe encontrar cosas que hacer mientras espera la muerte.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Por muy pequeño que sea un hombre, siempre descubrirá que puede serlo más.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Estamos aquí para desaprender las enseñanzas de la iglesia, el estado y nuestro sistema educativo. Estamos aquí para tomar cerveza. Estamos aquí para matar la guerra. Estamos aquí para reírnos del destino y vivir tan bien nuestra vida que la muerte tiemble al recibirnos.”
― Bukowski, Charles

“Sure, I’ve written about women and sex and madhouses, just like Bukowski did, but I’ve also written about many other topics, often utilizing other stylistic methods in doing so. Bukowski would probably have been annoyed with the rambling tone of my poems in Cells.”
― Scott C. Holstad, Cells

“I suppose like others
I have come through fire and sword,
love gone wrong,
head-on crashes, drunk at sea,
and I have listened to the simple sound of water running
in tubs
and wished to drown
but simply couldn't bear the others
carrying my body down three flights of stairs
to the round mouths of curious biddies...
the world has been darker than lights out
in a closet full of hungry bats,
and the whiskey and wine entered our veins
when blood was too weak to carry on;
and it will happen to others...”
― Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Damned

“today, suffering from drawn out hangover, the world ran dry. Bukowski died and one third of the world's winemakers will go broke.”
― Scott C. Holstad, Places

“Eu costumava beber 15 horas
por dia, mas em geral era vinho e cerveja. Eu deveria estar morto. Vou estar
morto. Nada mal, pensando nisso. Tive uma existência estranha e confusa, em
grande parte horrível, baixaria total. Mas acho que foi a forma com que me
arrastei pela merda que fez a diferença. Hoje, olhando pra trás, acho que exibi
certa compostura e classe, independentemente do que estava acontecendo.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

“Dentro y solo de nuevo, y la locura de la noche la locura del día.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Produce poco placer o ninguno matar a un hombre muerto.”
― Charles Bukowski

“La vida, tan fea como parece, quizá merezca vivirse tres o cuatro días más.”
― Charles Bukowski

“With pronounced crowds around him - towns rowdy with loud shouting - without pouting childishly, while making his case soundly, he announced it quite proudly (mouth smiling undoubtedly (without clouds of doubt frowning)): 'See, this wild thing about me: I don't live life without me. So, how now shall you crown me? No need to bow down for me, or drown me in salary, or go tout my mastery (like an ounce is astounding); or oppositely, clown me, and just sound like a mouse squeak. Though none are better than me, no one's ever less than me; and it rings out hourly, like a vow surrounding me, a thousand pound pact to me, an infinite galaxy (that fits in this house of me (as if it's my fallacy (like 'limitless boundaries' (within this reality)))) - it's what gets the best of me - my ground and my gravity, as once said by Bukowski, 'I've never met another man I'd rather be.”
― Criss Jami

“Peace is white sun reflections on summer pear trees, and ocean mist droplets defying gravity by air currents. Peace is caffeinated goodbye-kissing and velvet smiles laced with credence. Trumpet horns sound off the coming of Blue Jays, Swallows and Chickadee’s. And there is no sadness echoing within or without. There is a taste of God in every grass blade and car horn raging in the city. The stop lights are all green, and there are children playing in the fountains. A dog laps my hand, and finally—I remembered what it’s all about.”
― J. Carpenter, You, Me & The End of The World: Poetry Anthology

“Like Bukowski I lived alone, but it never felt right.”
― Avijeet Das

“It took a lot to excite me. I didn’t care. I didn’t like New York. I didn’t like Hollywood. I didn’t like rock music. I didn’t like anything. Maybe I was afraid. That was it�� I was afraid. I wanted to sit alone in a room with the shades down. I feasted upon that. I was a crank I was a lunatic.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“when a man puts that uniform on that he is the paid protector of things of the present time. he is here to see that things stay the way they are. if you like the way things are, then all cops are good cops. if you don’t like the way things are, then all cops are bad cops.”
― Charles Bukowski, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness

“Nije istina da sam jak. Razbijem se u hiljadu komadića, samo sam naučio da ne pravim buku”
― Bukowski

“I will always love Charles Bukowski. I adore the raw honesty in his work. No frills, he just said it. The best artists are gloriously naked.”
― Lioness DeWinter

“We would meet in Bars,
Bukowski and me,
And we would drink our whiskies neat,
Because that's what writers and poets did!”
― Avijeet Das

“Things remained in a type of stasis for the next couple of days, but I was bored. I wished I had a favorite Bukowski with me to read, either Women or Notes of a Dirty Old Man, which he’d been cool enough to sign for me once when I’d been over at his pad in San Pedro. I missed him. Still couldn’t believe he was gone.”
― Scott C. Holstad

“How are ya gonna make it?�� Becker asked.
“Seems like I’ve heard that question all my life.��
“Well, I don’t know about you but I’m going to try everything! War, women, travel, marriage, children, the works. The first car I own I’m going to take it completely apart! Then I’m going to put it back together again! I want to know about things, what makes them work! I’d like to be a correspondent in Washington, D.C. I’d like to be where big things are happening.��
“Washington’s crap, Becker.��
“And women? Marriage? Children?��
“C������.��
“Yeah? Well, what do you want?��
“To hide.��
“You poor fuck. You need another beer.��
“All right.��
The beer arrived.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“It was a Saturday night in December. I was in my room and I drank much more than usual, lighting cigarette after cigarette, thinking of girls and the city and jobs, and of the years ahead. Looking ahead I liked very little of what I saw. 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, Ham on Rye

“The poor had a right to fuck their way through their bad dreams. Sex and drink, and maybe love, was all they had.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“I sat back down and poured a glass of wine. I left my door open. The moonlight came in with the sounds of the city: juke boxes, automobiles, curses, dogs barking, radios.. .We were all in it together. We were all in one big shit pot together. There was no escape. We were all going to be flushed away.
A small cat walked by, stopped at my door and looked in. The eyes were lit by the moon: pure red like fire. Such wonderful eyes.
“Come on, kitty...�� I held my hand out as if there were food in it. “Kitty, kitty...��
The cat walked on by.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“I knew that I wasn’t entirely sane. I still knew, as I had as a child, that there was something strange about myself. I felt as if I were destined to be a murderer, a bank robber, a saint, a rapist, a monk, a hermit. I needed an isolated place to hide. Skid row was disgusting. The life of the sane, average man was dull, worse than death. There seemed to be no possible alternative. Education also seemed to be a trap. The little education I had allowed myself had made me more suspicious. What were doctors, lawyers, scientists? They were just men who allowed themselves to be deprived of their freedom to think and act as individuals. I went back to my shack and drank...”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye