Charles Bukowski Quotes

In chess, computers show that what we call 'strategy' is reducible to tactics, ultimately. It only looks creative to us. They are still just glorified cash registers. This should make us feel uncomfortable, whether or not we think computers will ever be good composers of music or artistic painters.

I do not write, I build.

We have so much inspiration. It's everywhere... So I always have a pen with me and a laptop, and I write everything down.

A writer is an artist. They're creating things out of thin air.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

My pen and paper causes a chain reaction, to get your brain relaxing.

You can't write poetry on the computer.

Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.

You don’t ask a writer what typewriter he uses.

Over time, I have come to see the work of literature less as narrating the world than "seeing the world with words." From the moment he begins to use words like colors in a painting, a writer can begin to see how wondrous and surprising the world is, and he breaks the bones of language to find his own voice. For this he needs paper, a pen, and the optimism of a child looking at the world for the first time.

If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.

Remember technology does not make good work. You can still write a poem on a brown paper bag, and haiku is just as profound as the pyramids.

I love to photograph the tools of one's trade: Duncan Grant's paintbrushes, the typewriter of Herman Hesse, or even my own guitar, a 1957 Fender Duo-Sonic.

Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.

I always describe writing a story as throwing bowling pins in the air and then catching them.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

Poetry - poiesis means a thing made.

Do some living and get yourself a typewriter.

I'm sure that writing isn't a craft, that is, something for which you learn the skills and go on turning out. It must come from some deep impulse, deep inspiration. That can't be taught, it can't be what you use in teaching.

Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it--

If a writer stops observing, he is finished.