Charles Bukowski Quotes

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

I don't understand why people are going mad about the lyrics I write? Do they expect everyone to become Mirza Ghalib?

In speaking, for convenience, of devices and expedients, I did not intend to imply that Shakespeare always deliberately aimed at the effects which he produced.

Read not Milton, for he is dry; nor Shakespeare, for he wrote of common life.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

I like poems that are complex.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

I am a writer of fragments.

Shaw is like a train. One just speaks the words and sits in one's place. But Shakespeare is like bathing in the sea - one swims where one wants.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.

A writer can be subjective, even digressive, or introspective and certainly judgmental. This is a simplification, of course, but as a general rule, it holds true.

I'm the Emily Dickinson of screenplays.

I am a poet, and I speak poetically.

When I write, I write everything from a rhythm point.