Charles Bukowski Quotes

there was something about that city, though it didn't let me feel guilty that I had no feeling for the things so many others needed. it let me alone. sitting up in my bed the lights out, hearing the outside sounds, lifting my cheap bottle of wine, letting the warmth of the grape enter me as I heard the rats moving about the room, I preferred them to humans. being lost, being crazy maybe is not so bad if you can be that way undisturbed. New Orleans gave me that. nobody ever called my name.

I'm a thousand miles from nowhere, time don't matter to me. I'm a thousand miles from nowhere and there's not place that I want to be.

I am more exempt and more distant than any man in the world.

I'm disappearing, avoiding most things.

There were moments when I really just thought, I don't need anything and I don't need anyone. I just want to go away and disappear.

I love my friends and family, but I also love it when they can't find me and I can spend all day reading or walking all alone, in silence, eight thousand miles away from everyone. All alone and unreachable in a foreign country is one my most favorite possible things to be.

I love New York! You walk around, nobody notices you, you don't notice anybody, you're in your own little world.

All these cities I go to, I never see them. They may be the most beautiful places in the world, but I'll just usually go to the nearest bar. I need a couple of hours by myself.

One of the odd enjoyments in life is to be alone in a room full of people. To have them there as unknowing human filler in your wide shot.

I just want to be left alone.

I would be at home reading, because I felt so disconnected from humanity.

If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.

Tore up my heart and shut it down. Nothing to do, nowhere to be. A simple little kind of free. Nothing to do, no one but me, and that's all I need. I'm perfectly lonely.

I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.

Oh to follow the road that leads away from everything, without anguish, death, winter waiting along it with their eyes open through the dew.

I haven't found one place in the world yet where I could disappear.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

I think that we're all totally isolated beings and always will be.

That idea of escapism... these words could sum up my life.

I think, at the end of the day, I have an outsider's heart.

My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely.

If I had my will I would live in a ship on the sea, and never come nearer to humanity than that!

We're all in this alone.

I longed from a tiny child to get away on my own. When I was five, I walked out along the sands from Redcar, nearly all the way to Hartlepool.

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.