Charles Bukowski Quotes

I can write best in the silence and solitude of the night, when everyone has retired.

I'm nocturnal when it comes to recording - I'm just more creative at night.

I work late at night. I'm awake and nobody bothers me. It's quiet and things come and talk to me in the silence.

And going into my studio at night, particularly at night when everybody's asleep, is just a total pleasure for me.

I don't really start writing until later in the night. I'm a night owl.

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.

I write a lot of my best music in the car, like late night. Three, four in the morning. I'm in the passenger seat, I got my driver, my getaway driver. My Bonnie, I'm Clyde. That's when everything is just settled. In the daytime it's chaotic. Everybody just goin' nowhere fast. In a rush to go nowhere.

I love to write when I feel like everybody else is asleep and when I feel like the world is kind of empty in some ways. I find, oddly enough, that I write about loneliness and isolation a lot.

People ask me whether I think that one day I might wake up one morning and run dry, but I've had the opposite feeling - that I would die before I had time to write all the ideas in my drawer.

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen.

I'm an artist. Artists don't need permission to work. Regardless of whether I'm acting or not, I write. I write when I'm tired in fact, because I believe your most pure thoughts surface.

I have great difficulty sitting in the middle of the night and writing. Everything I do comes spontaneous. Sometimes it takes a long time; sometimes it comes just like that.

I'm a bit of a night owl because that's when I feel the most creative and alive.

I prefer the night to the day and always stay up very late. Darkness is more peaceful, and I don't like sunshine - it hurts my eyes. When I used to live in more communal circumstances, I had to wait until everyone had gone to bed before I had the peace to write, and I still find I can get on with my writing much better at night.

I write best late at night, when everyone in the house has gone to bed. There's something magical about that late night silence that appeals to me.

I don't believe in writer's block.

If you know how to freestyle, you will never have writer's block.

I am always writing music. I have got unlimited ideas because I have been clean and sober for my entire life.

Staring at the blank page before you, Open up the dirty window, Let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find.

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.

I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious-by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but the solitary communion with the 'mountains & the woods'-the 'altars' of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures.

If I find out I have to write today and nothing else, that’s a perfect day. I know a lot of people who are great at it and make it look easy who are tortured and miserable people. Writing for me is perfect peace.

When I'm writing new material, I never have any trouble coming up with ideas.

Writing songs is no different than explaining to somebody what you dreamed last night: No one ever gives you crap for what you dreamed last night. "I was laying in my bed, and all of a sudden a stallion jumped on my bed and the next thing I know I was in Mars but it looked like my kitchen"... That's kind of what I do with my songs, write them in a dream-like manner. It's up to people to swallow it however they want.

I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint—old man propaganda.