1,615 Quotes by Charles Bukowski

I only want sweet peace and kindliness when I awaken – but there’s always some finger pointing, telling me some terrible deed I committed during the night. It seems I make a lot of mistakes and it seems that I am not allowed any.

It didn’t pay to trust another human being. Humans didn’t have it, whatever it took.

Her one drink had Cecelia giggling and talking and she was explaining that animals had souls too. Nobody challenged her opinion. It was possible, we knew. What we weren’t sure of was if we had any.

The trouble with a mask is it never changes.

I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can’t feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.

I don’t remember going to bed, but in the morning, there I was.

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.

My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don't want it smoothed out.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.