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Explore more quotes by Charles Bukowski


"My poems are only bits of scratchingon the floor of acage."


"...they would say 'he said this, he did that', but they would never say 'she said this, she did that'. So I would say, they are sick, and I am well. Pardon me."


"Like anybody can tell you, I am not a very nice man. I don't know the word. I have always admired the villain, the outlaw, the son of a bitch. I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions. I also like vile women, drunk cursing bitches with loose stockings and sloppy mascara faces. I'm more interested in perverts than saints. I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society."


"The lies of centuries, the lies of love,the lies of Socrates and Blake and Christwill be your bedmates and tombstonesin a death that will never end."


"In this land some of us fuck more than we die but most of us die better than we fuck."
Exlpore more Addiction quotes

"At the end of almost every AA meeting, someone read the Promises. One of these was 'We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it'. Dan thought he would always regret the past, but he had quit trying to shut the door. Why bother, when it would just come open again? The fucking had no latch, let alone a lock."

"It is hard to understand addiction unless you have experienced it."

"Drinking is such a necessity to human life that people cannot fathom an individual who, like a child confined to a church pew, gets little enjoyment out of it and would rather do other things."

"The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. ... Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers - common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons."
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