Charles Bukowski Quotes

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.

And the more I drink the more I feel it. That's why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink.... I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!

I drink to forget I drink.

I took a bottle of pills. I'd been in Europe and I had a lot of absinthe and I was just drinking and drinking, trying to, you know, just shut my body down.

The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and of generosity. What one of us but can call to mind some relative more promising in youth than all his fellows, who has fallen a sacrifice to his rapacity?

A pill to make you numb A pill to make you dumb A pill to make you anybody else But all the drugs in this world Won't save her from herself.

Simon Gray, I decided when I first witnessed this frog into prince transformation, did not have a drinking problem. He had a drinking solution.

So what are you planning to do with the rest of your life? Develop a drinking problem. More Scotch, please.

Poor me, poor me, pour me another.

Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.

He was hiding from his problems in a bottle, something that went against every piece of my nature. Me? I couldnʹt let my problems win without a fight.

There's nothing romantic, nothing grand, nothing heroic, nothing brave, nothing like that about drinking. It's a real coward's death.

I was always playing the hard-bitten drunk.

I had the taste of the alcohol since I was 11. It allowed me to be clever, charming and to behave outrageously. Acting also allowed me not to be me. So I could indulge every fantasy in this paradise of America.

Most of my life I've had long periods of feeling down and lost. That's why every five years or so I've smashed my life to pieces and started again.

You can't drown yourself in drink. I've tried, you float.

I know I'm drinking myself to a slow death, but then I'm in no hurry.

Music's always been really cathartic. It's the best drug for me to get away from the everyday pressures just for a second via a good song.

Movies are like an expensive form of therapy for me.

I envy people who drink - at least they know what to blame everything on.

First the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man.

The King, long in the habit of drowning his cares in wine, plunges deeper and deeper; the Queen cries out but, but sins on.

Drunkenness was extremely common… It seemed for many the only refuge from depression and misery. The effect of drunkenness upon the ordinary relationship of husband and wife, parents and children, was disastrous.

When I was drinking I was thinking I was having a good time but it came back twice as bad, the depression. It was just a vicious circle - drinking, not caring about myself - and it gave me a bad low.

I went off the rails for a few years with drink and different things.