1,615 Quotes by Charles Bukowski

That's what friendship is, sharing the prejudice of experience.

You've got to rise from the floor alone or fall back alone.

I've never been lonely. I've been in a room... I've felt suicidal, I've been depressed. I've felt awful ... awful beyond all , but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude...

Hemingway and Saroyan had the line, the magic of it. The problem was that Hemingway didn't know how to laugh and Saroyan was filled with sugar.

and the color in my eyes has gone back into the sea.

Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.

why don't we go back out there and tell them what happened? because nothing happened except that everybody has been driven insane and stupid by life. in this society there are only two things that count: don't be caught without money and don't get caught high on any kind of high. (Night Streets of Madness)

I have been treated better than I should have been---not by life in general nor by the machinery of things but by women.

Death meant little to me. It was the last joke in a series of bad jokes.