BY SOFO ARCHON
Many years ago, a well known book critic in San Francisco, California, named Stephen Kessler uttered the following words about Charles Bukowski: “Without trying to make himself look good, much less heroic, Bukowski writes with a nothing-to-lose truthfulness which sets him apart from most other ‘autobiographical’ novelists and poets. Firmly in the American tradition of the maverick, Bukowski writes with no apologies from the frayed edge of society.”
Bukowski was indeed one of those writers that explored many aspects of life and tried to express his discoveries through his writings in one of the most truthful and unique ways. Here you will read for yourself some powerful quotes by Charles Bukowski on life and love, fear and death, art and creativity, humor and irony, as well as boredom and meaninglessness.
1. “We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
2. “The way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head.”
3. “On such jobs men become tired. They experience a weariness beyond fatigue. They say mad, brilliant things. Out of my head, I cussed and talked and cracked jokes and sang. Hell boils with laughter.”
4. “If you want to know where God is, ask a drunk.”
5. “I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here.”
6. “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.”
7. “Find what you love and let it kill you.”
8. “Don’t feel sorry for me because I am alone, for even at the most terrible moments, humor is my companion.”
9. “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”
10. “It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
11. “Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
12. “I would say that Mickey Mouse has a greater influence on the American public than Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Rabelais, Shostakovitch, Lenin, and/or Van Gogh. Which says ‘What?’ about the American Public. Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.”
13. “Some people never go crazy, what truly horrible lives they must live.”
14. “If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it.”
15. “She’s mad but she’s magic, there’s no lie in her fire.”
16. “Nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. It’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.”
17. “I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
18. “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubt, while the stupid people are full of confidence.”
19. “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.”
20. “If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it.”