Charles Bukowski Quotes

I hate the word 'hippy'. I hate a lot of people, and hippies don't do that!

People can have their punk ideals, but I don't really care about that kind of thing.

When I was a child, I was one of the kids who wore black all the time, and when the kids asked me why I wore black, I said things like, 'I'm mourning the death of modern society.' I mean, I was a riot.

Punk was never about one particular clean-cut imagery... it's about many, many individuals coming very loosely together.

Everybody was starting to grow long hair and wear pink suits and purple glasses and stuff and then, I suppose, some people thought we were crazy, but we weren't really crazy because we're all still here!

Punk is not just the sound, the music. Punk is a lifestyle.

Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.

You can't be a punk all your life.

I can't live in a world of dullards. So I think on that level, I'm definitely punk.

I remember at school one day there was a vocabulary list on the chalkboard, and the word 'nonconformist' was on there, and it said, 'Someone that doesn't appeal to society, someone who doesn't fit in.' We had this whole conversation about it, and I realized it cohered to the punk-rock world that I was into.

What we didn't realize then - and one of the many things Timothy Leary was wrong about - is that when you drop out, you inevitably also drop in.

The older I get, the more of an anarchist I become, and I don't mean in a punk rock way.

There's nothing wrong with being a hippie.

Punk became a circus didn't it? Everybody got it wrong. The message was supposed to be: Don't follow us, do what you want!

On a scale of one to ten, how punk am I? Apple. I don't use your scale.

No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction -- toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.

To get the hippie out of certain characters is probably the most difficult thing for me. I was not a hippie by choice but by birth.

I'm compared to Kerouac, I suppose, because he traveled and rejected middle-class values, but the similarities end there.

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.

'Punk' doesn't mean Mohawks and safety pins. It's about not conforming.

I have busted more hippies' noses than all the narcs in the free world.

When I first read 'On the Road,' it helped me figure out how to live against the grain. Now I wonder how to be subversive when the subversive has become mainstream.

My parents were hippies.

Punk was defined by an attitude rather than a musical style.

I was a little self-centered gutter punk in the early 1980s and all I wanted to do was diss everybody.