Charles Bukowski Quotes

There is a fundamental difference between men and women - women need romance, men need intrigue.

I am one of the few men honest enough to say they do not understand women.

Men and women can absolutely be friends, and that's what we need to be. Part of the problem is that we aren't friends enough. Our relationships are negotiations, and that is not friendship.

To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.

Friendship can exist between persons of different sexes, without any coarse or sensual feelings; yet a woman always looks upon a man as a man, and so a man will look upon a woman as a woman.

Men are not very good at loving, but they are experts at admiring and respecting; the woman who goes after their admiration and respect will often come out better than she who goes out after their love.

...gender relationships, which are tough for people to deal with, are key to whether a society orients to domination or partnership in all its relations.

Women are quite able to make friends with a man; but to preserve such a friendship - that no doubt requires the assistance of a slight physical antipathy

Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.

Sex is much better with a woman, but then one can't live with a woman.

I wanted to finally feel better about understanding. I painted my wife because I wanted to understand her. I can talk to her, but I didn't understand why I was so compelled.

Money, horse racing and women: three things the boys just can't figure out.

It isn’t about looks; gorgeous women get dumped every day.

Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!

I have three women in the house. I get to be wrong three times a day.

You are asking, 'Is the concept of soul mates more useful than marriage?' Concepts don't matter. What matters is your understanding. You can change the word marriage to the word soul mates, but you are the same. You will make the same hell out of soul mates as you have been making out of marriage - nothing has changed, only the word, the label. Don't believe in labels too much.

A man without a woman is like a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman who makes the man go off.

What signifies knowing the Names, if you know not the Natures of things.

No matter what kind of backgrounds two men are from, if you go, 'Hey, man, women are crazy,' you've got a friend.

I don't suppose any man has ever understood any woman since the beginning of things. You don't understand our imaginations, how wild our imaginations can be.

What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.

For he loved her and he understood that a woman cannot always live as a man. He understood that she cannot always think as he thought, walk as he walked, breathe the air that he took in. She would always be a different being from him, listening to a different music, hearing a different sound, familiar with a different element.

I'm more interested than Philip Roth in understanding women, even if I do it imperfectly. But that book, Portnoy's Complaint, is literary punk in this way that is rare.

Relationship films are political. If a woman is sitting in a waiting room in an office and a man walks in and sits down, it's a political situation. If he decides to smoke, does he ask her or does he just light up? If he lights up, what does she do? It's politics.

If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers.