Charles Bukowski Thinking Quotations

I don't carry notebooks and I don't consciously store ideas. I try not to think that I am a writer and I am pretty good at doing that. I don't like writers, but then I don't like insurance salesmen either.

I can't think of any poet-recluses outside of one dead Jeffers. [Robinson Jeffers] The rest of them want to slobber over each other and hug each other. It appears to me that I am the last of the poet-recluses.

How are his poems?" "He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.

i dunno," i said, "but i have an idea that people who don't think too much tend to look younger longer

It seemed better to delay thinking.

This is a world where everybody’s gotta do something. Ya know, somebody laid down this rule that everybody’s gotta do something, they gotta be something. You know, a dentist, a glider pilot, a narc, a janitor, a preacher, all that . . . Sometimes I just get tired of thinking of all the things that I don’t wanna do. All the things that I don’t wanna be. Places I don’t wanna go, like India, like getting my teeth cleaned. Save the whale, all that, I don’t understand that . . .

That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.

I think I need a drink.' 'Almost everybody does only they don't know it.

Sometimes a man doesn’t know what to do about things and sometimes it’s best to lie very still and try not to think at all about anything.

but isn't there always one good thing to look back on? think of how many cups of coffee we drank together.

They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.

young or old, good or bad, I don't think anything dies as slow and as hard as a writer.

if you think they didn't go crazy in tiny rooms just like you're doing now without women without food without hope then you're not ready.

for a man of 55 who didn't get laid until he was 23 and not very often until he was 50 I think that I should stay listed via Pacific Telephone until I get as much as the average man has had

To me, nudity is a joke. I don't think nude people are very attractive at all. I like my women fully clothed. I like to imagine what might be under there. It might not be the standard thing. Imagine, stripping a woman down, and she has a body like a little submarine. With periscope, propellers, torpedoes. That would be the one for me. I'd marry her right off and be faithful to the end.

There may not be a hell, but those who judge may create one. I think people are over-taught. They are over-taught everything. You have to find out by what happens to you, how you will react. I'll have to use a strange term here... "good." I don't know where it comes from, but I feel that there's an ultimate strain of goodness born in each of us. I don't believe in God, but I believe in this "goodness" like a tube running through our bodies. It can be nurtured. It's always magic, when on a freeway packed with traffic, a stranger makes room for you to change lanes... it gives you hope.

I should think that many of our poets, the honest ones, will confess to having no manifesto. It is a painful confession but the art of poetry carries its own powers without having to break them down into critical listings. I do not mean that poetry should be raffish and irresponsible clown tossing off words into the void. But the very feeling of a good poem carries its own reason for being... Art is its own excuse, and it’s either Art or it’s something else. It’s either a poem or a piece of cheese.

I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.

There's a small balcony here, the door is open and I can see the lights of the cars on the Harbor Freeway south, they never stop, that roll of lights, on and on. All those people. What are they doing? What are they thinking? We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't.

she is no longer the beautiful woman she was. she sends photos of herself sitting upon a rock by the ocean alone and damned. I could have had her once. I wonder if she thinks I could have saved her?

I was only kidding about the hundred," she says. oh," I say, "what will it cost me?" she lights her cigarette with my lighter and looks at me through the flame: her eyes tell me. look," I say, "I don't think I can ever pay that price again.

human relationships simply aren't durable. I think back to the women in my life. they seem non-existent.

Existence was not only absurd, it was plain hard work. Think of how many times you put on your underwear in a lifetime. It was appalling, it was disgusting, it was stupid.

The difference between a brave man and a coward is a coward thinks twice before jumping in the cage with a lion. The brave man doesn't know what a lion is. He just thinks he does.

people see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's great. an Academy Award means that you don't stink quite as much as your cousin.

I don't think I'll travel anymore. Travel is nothing but an inconvenience. There is always enough trouble where you are.

I don't think I have written a poem when I was completely sober. But I have written a few good ones or a few bad ones under the hammer of a black hangover when I didn't know whether another drink or a blade would be the best thing.

if you get married they think you're finished and if you are without a woman they think you're incomplete.

I felt I had to win. It seemed very important. I didn't know why it was important and I kept thinking, why do I think this is so important? And another part of me answered, just because it is.

Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem.

..few writers like other writers' works. The only time they like them is when they are dead or if they have been for a long time. Writers only like to sniff their own turds. I am one of those. I don't even like to talk to writers, look at them or worse, listen to them. And the worst is to drink with them, they slobber all over themselves, really look piteous, look like they are searching for the wing of the mother. I'd rather think about death than about other writers. Far more pleasant.

mercy, I think, doesn't the human race know anything about mercy?

Drinking is another way of thinking, another way of living. It gives you two lives instead of one.

I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can't feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.

I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.

I don't know about other people, but when I wake up in the morning and put my shoes on, I think, Jesus Christ, now what?