Charles Bukowski Quotes

Although I never publicly defended promiscuity, I never publicly attacked it. I attempted to avoid the subject, in part because I felt, and often still feel, unable to live up to the ideals I really hold.

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

I feel weird talking about it, because how can I, as the guitar player of Slipknot, sit here and say, 'Oh, I have trouble.' You know what I mean?

I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like "fidelity" and "adultery", by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that I had him I'd be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.

She couldn't take her eyes off the boxers. Mostly, she had a view of the back, but he turned halfway when he looked over. She commanded herself not to look at the front flap, which, of course, was exactly what she honed in on. He spit and put his mouth under the tap to get some water. All while just wearing underwear. All while she just stared at the crucial spot of the Action Pants.

I know very well that I have no reason to feel aggrieved - I am fully aware of how lucky I am, but knowing it and still being down makes me hate myself all the more.

Yes, there is something in me hateful, repulsive," thought Ljewin, as he came away from the Schtscherbazkijs', and walked in the direction of his brother's lodgings. "And I don't get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself in such a position".

I've been a sinner and a saint. If you've been a saint all your life, it's pretty easy to sleep at night. If you've been a sinner, you're just as comfortable in it. I've walked both sides of the fence, and there are times I can't sleep and I wake the engineer up and get it out of me. But it usually doesn't pour all the way out. I have to come back and have the conversation that you usually try not to have with yourself. That's how it gets resolved.

He was sick with lust and mesmerized with regret

If I cried me a river of all my confessions, would I drown in my shallow regret?

I go back to my room and lie under the covers, trying not to think of Gale and thinking of nothing else.

But there was not a moment when she did not see Carol in her mind, and all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol. That evening, the dark flat streets of New York, the tomorrow of work, the milk bottle dropped and broken in her sink, became unimportant. She flung herself on her bed and drew a line with a pencil on a piece of paper. And another line, carefully, and another. A world was born around her, like a bright forest with a million shimmering leaves.

I love you still, but with your death I succumbed to a kind of infatuation. I convinced myself that what you and I had, so very briefly, was of far vaster and deeper import than it truly was. Of all the weapons we chose to turn upon ourselves, guilt is the sharpest, Silverfox. It can carve one's own past into unrecognizable shapes, false memories leading to beliefs that sow all kinds of obsessions.

Among austere men intimacy involves shame--and is something precious.

Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold.

When Jared smiled, his teeth were stained with fresh scarlet. "Don't you hate me?" he demanded. "I'd hate me." "You just tried to drown yourself," Ash said. "You seem to hate yourself plenty already.

If I don't shut down my brain soon, my imagination will take off so far about what could be with this guy, that nothing will ever just be.-- Norah, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

She had been innocent once, a little girl playing with feathers on the floor of a devil's lair. She wasn't innocent now, but she didn't know what to do about it. This was her life: magic and shame and secrets and teeth and a deep, nagging hollow at the center of herself where something was most certainly missing.

[on Jessica Simpson] Yeah, that girl is like crack cocaine to me. Sexually it was crazy. That's all I'll say. It was like napalm, sexual napalm.

Only the dead can be forgiven; But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.

I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuadinig arguments of my best friends.

She regretted having taken his hand, she wanted to get away from there as soon as possible, to hide her shame, never again to see that man who had witnessed all that was most sordid in her, and who nevertheless continued to treat her with such tenderness. But again she remembered Mari's words: She didn't need to explain her life to anyone, not even to the young man standing before her.

If I start writing a song and you try to have a conversation with me, you're a bad person.

I'm not moving from an ideological standpoint. Sometimes I'm trying to make my life better. Sometimes I'm trying to make my life worse! I'm trying to find a happy medium that I can make some sense of.

I am disappointed with myself. I am disappointed not so much with the particular things I have done as with the aspects of who I have become. I have a nagging sense that all is not as it should be.