1,615 Quotes by Charles Bukowski

I didn't feel that way about it. I had been playing with death for some time. I can't say we were the best of friends but we were well acquainted.

Art is its own excuse, and it's either Art or it's something else. It's either a poem or a piece of cheese.

one can never be sure whether it's good poetry or bad acid

Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.

bad writing's like bad women: there's just not much you can do about it

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.

Long before I became 'rich and famous' I just sat round drinking wine and staring at the walls.

my mother, poor fish, wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile! why don't you ever smile?" and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw

I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.