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"I write fiction""What's fiction?""Fiction is an improvement on life."
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"What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do you damage."

"Novelists are basically inviting their readers to play a game of pretend. That's what fiction is: a game of pretend."

"Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets."

"Imminent GM bankruptcy was always fiction, created by Wall Street and the media."

"A man walked across the moors from Razorback to Lancre town without seeing a single marshlight, head-less dog, strolling tree, ghostly coach or comet, and had to be taken in by a tavern and given a drink to unsteady his nerves."

"Flakes of snow swirled and danced across the porch. The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly three-quarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact it was now cut off from the world. Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster."

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."

"You can't burn down a made-up place."

"A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning."
Explore more quotes by Charles Bukowski


"Potential," I said, "doesn't mean a thing. You've got to do it. Almost every baby in a crib has more potential than I have."


"The writing of somemenis like a vast bridgethat carries youoverthe many thingsthat claw and tear.The Wine of Forever."


"The street to my left was backed up with traffic and I watched the people waiting patiently in the cars. There was almost always a man and a women, staring straight ahead, not talking. It was, finally, for everyone, a matter of waiting. You waited and you waited- for the hospital, the doctor, the plumber, the madhouse, the jail, papa death himself. First the signal red, then the signal was green. The citizens of the world ate food and watched t.v. and worried about their jobs or lack of the same, while they waited."


"She slammed the door andwas gone.I looked at the closed doorand at the doorknoband strangelyI didn't feelalone."
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