Charles Bukowski

"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."

"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 would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life."

"If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women, it is because of these who I met were that. There are many 'bads' - bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even 'bad' white males. Only, when you write about 'bad' white males, they don't complain about it. And need I say that there are 'good' blacks, 'good' homosexuals and 'good' women?"

"Much publishing is done through politics, friends, and natural stupidity."

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

"Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities."

"There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts."

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

"We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system."

"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."

"What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper."

"You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics."