Charles Bukowski Quotes

I pecked my stories out two-fingered on the Remington portable typewriter my mother had bought me. I had begged for it when I was ten.

In a novel, you can always go back and make it look like you knew what you were doing all along before the thing goes out and gets published.

A lot of time, with stories, I'll start out with a title and try to dream myself into the story that it evokes - a kind of subconscious exercise in which I'm trawling for some kind of entryway into fiction.

I write short stories. They may appear big in size, but when you consider it, they're four or five novels in one... In return for picking up one of my books, I'm trying to give them value for their money... the goal of writing any book is to create the illusion that what you are reading is reality and you're part of it.

I'm not a writer, so I don't know what that looks like, but I can only imagine that you get all those great minds in that room, of those particular writers that created the show, and it's going to be great.

Fiction is a branch of neurology

Fiction is always really a labor.

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

I like to read fiction best and I like to write fiction, too.

...writing fiction...is no job for intellectual cowards.

When your characters are really living they tell you what they do.

NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

I'd like to ghost-write Liz Phair's novel. But I don't really know about that. It seems like a dignified thing to segue into as I approach the other side of 45. My hands are just full right now. There's the potential to try to write some kind of biography of Pavement - sort of a cryptic, nonfiction/fiction blowout. The story's never been told well. But that's a lot of inward-gazing that I'm not sure I want to do. I like to look out.

My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

My job is writing for people to enjoy and then writing about a broader and a deeper world.

I find the characters in my head and the more I write about them, the better I get to know them.

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.

As you become acquainted with a character you are creating, you add parts of yourself that are pertinent to that character.

Jane's stories are extremely sensible. Then Diana puts too many murders into hers. She says most of the time she doesn't know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them.

A novel, basically, is writing one sentence — then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence.

And you can look up just about anything, even dirty pictures. Every now and again, the dirtiest pictures you ever saw would pop up on the screen. Imagine!

When I write fiction, I create characters whose views are not my own, and I allow them to be eloquent in defense of their, not my, views.

Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.

The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.