Top 50 Charles Bukowski Quotes: Laureate of American Lowlife

Top 50 Charles Bukowski Quotes: Laureate of American Lowlife

Deep down what lays, in corners, in lanes what some say. Dark, bright, truth, love; and what is right? A writer often gets webbed with these types of questions. They only want to peel out everything and want to see what is there. A writer is a mysterious person. To whom, no one could know but he knows everything. In this we are going to talk about top 50 Charles Bukowski and going to tell Charles Bukowski quotes of all time.

Who was Charles Bukowski? And all-time favorite Charles Bukowski top 50 quotes.

First of all, his full name is Henry Charles Bukowski. He was born on 16 August 1920. He was a German American novelist, poet, short story writer and novelist. His writing greatly is affected by the American low life. Everyday struggles, unemployment, struggles of poor and middle class family life. He immensely wrote of his home city Los Angeles. Bukowski almost got published 60 books. His poems are popular among youth, almost in all ages of people. He had written innumerable pomes, short stories and six novels. Though Bukowski was a famous and popular writer. But rather than in America, he got popular in Europe, especially in Germany. As on Ernest Hemingway, FBI kept a file on him also due to his column Notes of a Dirty Old Man published in underground newspaper Open city. Charles spoke English with a rigid German accent. Because of this, he often got taunted by his equals. He got short name due to all this, ‘Heini’. His father was abusive and Charles often got beatings. Bukowski was a kind of introvert in his young age and socially withdrawn due to his severe acne problem. His early teen was no just sad and socially not happy. Bukowski felt limitless joy when his on faithful friend introduced him to alcohol.

Bukowski also got arrested by FBI during on-going World War Second. At that time, US was at war with Germany. During that time, almost all German-Americans were suspected of loyalty because of their German origin. He died on March 9, 1994 due to leukemia. I like his poems greatly that are often about women, relationship, love, alcohol, about all these complex issues, where people normally coming in the middle path, get blinded and question themselves of being right and wrong. If you are not getting, you read his poetry and you would know what I want to say. Here are all the top 50 Charles Bukowski quotes.

Top 50 Charles Bukowski Quotes

Charles Bukowski Quotes on Love;

“It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.”

Top 50 Charles Bukowski Quotes

“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.”

Charles Bukowski Quotes on Love

“The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.”

“My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.”

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”

“She’s mad, but she’s magic. There’s no lie in her fire.”

“Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It’s like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss.”

“I was in love again. I was in trouble”

“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.”

“Being alone never felt right. Sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.”

Charles Bukowski Quotes on Life 

“To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.”

Charles Bukowski Quotes on Life

“We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”

“I would be married, but I’d have no wife, I would be married to single life.”

“I used to live on one candy bar a day – it cost a nickel. I always remember the candy bar was called Payday. That was my payday. And that candy bar tasted so good, at night I would take one bite, and it was so beautiful.”

“Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, ‘Don’t try.’ That fits the writing, too. I don’t try; I just type.”

“There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.”

“My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights, and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‘light’ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.”

“Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.”

“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”

“If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.”

“What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”

“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind.”

“We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable.”

“If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.”

“Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.”

“You have to die a few times before you can really live.”

“My ambition is handicapped by laziness.”

“Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.”

“Without literature, life is hell.”

“There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.”

Charles Bukowski Quotes on Writing 

“I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.”

Charles Bukowski Quotes on Writing

“I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.”

“Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.”

“When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.”

“When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.”

“Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.”

“I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.”

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”

“In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.”

“If I stop writing I am dead. And that’s the only way I’ll stop: dead.”

Charles Bukowski Quotes on Women

“Any asshole can chase a skirt, art takes discipline.”

Charles Bukowski Quotes on Women

“She’s mad but she’s magic. There’s no lie in her fire.”

“What woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.”

“Few beautiful women were willing to indicate in public that they belonged to someone.”

“I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”

“Every woman is different. Basically, they seem to be a combination of the best and the worst—both magic and terrible. I’m glad that they exist, however.”

“And yet women-good women–frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.”

“There is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy”

“Once a woman turns against you, forget it…”

“They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they’ll spit on you.”

Interesting Facts About Charles Bukowski

Interesting Facts About Charles Bukowski

  • As Ernest Hemingway, Charles Bukowski was also a cat person. He had a cat, named Minx.  
  • When Charles died, his burial was conducted by Buddhist monks as requested by his wife. The reason for this is still unknown. 
  • In his starting career, he worked in a post office. When his writing started to give him bread and butter, he left his post office job and continued his writing. 
  • His first novel was ‘Post Office’, which he completed in three weeks, and wrote it just after quitting the post office job.
  • Time called Bukowski a Laureate of American lowlife in 1986.
  • Bukowski’s father often beat him with a razor strop three times a week around the age of six to eleven years. And these beatings helped his writing as he said. 
  • When he was 24, his first short story got published in Story magazine. Short story name was ‘Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip’. 
  • Bukowski had a daughter, whose name was Marina Louise Bukowski. 
  • Bukowski had many relationship and love affairs with innumerable women that were material for his poems. 

So these are all the interesting facts and a bit biographical sketch and some of Charles Bukowski’s best quotes we have compiled for you in this single post that you would love to share and read when you just want to quickly read his quotes and think somewhere whether they resemble your life too? Yeah, somewhere it is and everyone gets affected by. Personally, I like Bukowski’s poems. I haven’t yet read any of his novels but here and there often I stumble upon his poems and they inspire me, give a kind of depth, a sense that compel me that how is this if something is. What we living and why we living? It is so baffling. But it is as it is, different and complex. And yes, you never forget to share Charles Bukowski top 50 quotes. Though we don’t market much. But on QWM, you find original and authentic quotes, wishes and messages. Those that belong to famous writers, they only belong to them.!