Iris > Iris's Quotes

“according to my figures I've only had 2500 pieces of ass but I've watched 12500 horse races, and if I have any advice to anybody, it's this: take up watercolor painting.”
― Charles Bukowski

“The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.”
― John Steinbeck

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

“If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose”
― Charles Bukowski and Carl Weissner

“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
― Charles Bukowski

“those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that.”
― Charles Bukowski

“you boys can keep your virgins
give me hot old women in high heels
with asses that forgot to get old.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.”
― Charles Bukowski

“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“dogs and angels are not
very far apart”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“great writers are indecent people
they live unfairly
saving the best part for paper.

good human beings save the world
so that bastards like me can keep creating art,
become immortal.
if you read this after I am dead
it means I made it.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“Of course it's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.”
― Charles Bukowski

“to fight for each minute is to
fight for what is possible within
yourself,
so that your life and your death
will not be like
theirs.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art. ”
― Charles Bukowski

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“It's better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.”
― Charles Bukowski

“it seemed to me that I had never met
another person on earth
as discouraging to my happiness
as my father.
and it appeared that I had
the same effect upon
him.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“Some lose all mind and become soul,insane.
some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual.
some lose both and become accepted”
― Charles Bukowski

“There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there”
― Bukowski C.

“I drive around the streets
an inch away from weeping,
ashamed of my sentimentality and
possible love.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“Dying should come easy:
like a freight train you
don't hear when
your back is
turned.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain: New Poems – Gritty and Inspiring Unpublished Verse by Charles Bukowski

“If you are going to try, go all the way or don't even start. If you follow it you will be alive with the gods. It is the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski