Charles Bukowski Quotes

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.

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.

Pour me something tall and strong, make it a Hurricane before I go insane. It's only half past twelve but I don't care, it's 5 O'clock somewhere.

And we spend the rest of the evening getting very pissed and eating ice cream, as we always do when something good or bad happens to either one of us.

That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.

As far as I'm concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk

Imma sip until I feel it, Imma smoke until it's done.

That is the remarkable thing about drinking: it brings people together so quickly, but between night and morning it sets an interval again of years.

Music and art and culture is escapism, and escapism sometimes is healthy for people to get away from reality. The problem is when they stay there.

I learned denial from my mother. I just never confronted things and if anybody did, I just would go crazy.

It's good to laugh at times that feel inappropriate.

Beer. Now there's a temporary solution.

In entertainment, we have a comfort level with crisis.

I drank more wine when I wasn't working as much, to be honest.

My parents were going through a divorce, and I used to go spend all weekend at the movies to get away from it all. There was something about the sameness of the movies. It was a place for me to go to express my emotions, you know, and let it out.

Music should be made to make people forget their problems, if only for a short while.

As a younger man, I thought the best thing art could do was to challenge people's mindsets, and I still do, but I've come round to the value of entertainment. A show like 'The Interceptor,' which gives the audience that release, after a hard day, of just sitting down and enjoying themselves - that adds value to lives, too.

It's definitely a reason I game so much: to forget about the pressures of fighting and the hardships of training and everything.

Maybe I'm too sensitive to the struggle, but I think a lot of people that listen to music are trying to escape.

It's easy to sort of put a sheen across humanity if you're making a film for people who want to escape their own problems. But sometimes a movie can, in the most cathartic ways, expose those problems.

An actor with a genuine gift has the power to transport you from whatever your own pains may be into an entirely different world, freeing you from whatever you may be going through. At its best, it can be better than any medication.

When something tragic happens, all we want to do is escape it. Acting has always been kind of a twisted way of escaping my own problems and my own reality.

We run when we're scared, we run when we're ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.

Television is really what we've been looking for all our lives.... [It's] perfect. You turn a few knobs and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primordial ooze.