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"There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through."
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"Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists."

"A writer is like a stick of rock - the words go right through."

"For a writer it's a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what's available and who gets to read it."

"I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show."

"Writers have a well-deserved reputation for being eccentric. Everything you've heard is true."

"Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real."

"My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire."

"Scotland consistently produces world-class writers."
Explore more quotes by Charles Bukowski


"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."


"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."


"I killed four flies while waiting. Damn, death was everywhere. Man, bird, beast, reptile, rodent, insect, fish didn't have a chance. The fix was in. I didn't know what to do about it. I got depressed. You know, I see a boy at the supermarket, he's packing my groceries, then I see him sticking himself into his own grave along with the toilet paper, the beer and the chicken breasts."


"During my worst timeson the park benchesin the jailsor living withwhoresI always had this certaincontentment-I wouldn't call ithappiness-it was more of an innerbalancethat settled forwhatever was occuringand it helped in thefactoriesand when relationshipswent wrongwith thegirls.it helpedthrough thewars and thehangoversthe backalley fightsthehospitals.to awaken in a cheap roomin a strange city andpull up the shade-this was the craziest kind ofcontentmentand to walk across the floorto an old dresser with acracked mirror-see myself, ugly,grinning at it all.what matters most ishow well youwalk through thefire."


"Ithink that theworld should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, justcats andrain, rain and cats, very nice, goodnight."


"People need me. I fillthem. if they can't see mefor awhile the get desperate, they getsick.but if I see them too oftenI get sick. it's hard to feedwithout getting fed."


"Turgenev was a very serious fellow but he could make me laugh because a truth first encountered can be very funny. When someone else's truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it just for you, that's great."
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