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"People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way."
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"This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job."
"Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart."
"A book is as private and consensual as sex."
"And all who told it added something new And all who heard it made enlargements too."
"For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years."
"I haven't stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various."
"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
Explore more quotes by Charles Bukowski
"The world is better withoutthem.only the plants and the animals aretrue comrades.I drink to them and withthem."
"All we do is sleep, and eat and lay around and make love. We're like slugs. Slug-love, I call it."
"My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure."
"You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time all else is grandiose romanticism or politics."
"Sometimes all we need to be able to continue aloneare the deadrattling the wallsthat close us in."
"I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again."
"Of one hundred movies there's one that is fair, one that's good and ninety eight that are very bad. most movies start badly and steadily get worse."
"There's no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they're printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up and started drinking."
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