Charles Bukowski Quotes

Wine and women do not go with song. Alcohol is the worst enemy of the imagination.

If you are to be employed by the BBC, you must promise not to get drunk…. You look as if you will be washed out of poetry by whisky.

Sometimes the hangover provides inspiration.

Writers often have a 'drunk' that is different than anyone else's. That's why it's so insidious and so damning. First of all, because they can write when they're drinking - or they think they can. A lot of writers will tell me - and this is the latest one I've heard - you drink while you're thinking about what to write, but when you actually write, you sober up.

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.

A real hangover is nothing to try out family remedies on. The only cure for a real hangover is death.

I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.

Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Paintings are like a beer, only beer tastes good and it's hard to stop drinking beer.

Beer. Now there's a temporary solution.

Wine is a mocker, strong drink is riotous; and whoever is deceived by it is not wise

The plan was to drink until the pain is over, But what's worse, the pain or the hangover?

That impulse I think is a form of love. Poetry is something that comes to you, rather than your having to work out its form beforehand.

Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong: They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

If you subtracted all of the great artists who never drank, who never went to excess, you wouldn't have any more art left. What kind of poem are you gonna get out of a glass of iced tea?

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

There is also a third kind of madness, which is possession by the Muses, enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric... But he, who, not being inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art - he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.

I think better when I'm not sober

Why, if 'tis dancing you would be, There's brisker pipes than poetry. Say, for what were hop-yards meant, Or why was Burton built on Trent? Oh many a peer of England brews Livelier liquor than the Muse, And malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man. Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink For fellows whom it hurts to think: Look into the pewter pot To see the world as the world's not.

Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

Ya think that the whiskey tastes good? Try a big cup of sobriety - now that is the good stuff!

Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.

No art is possible without a dance with death.