Charles Bukowski Quotes

I am the worst influence. If you can't handle your vices, then I am the Devil.

The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and of generosity. What one of us but can call to mind some relative more promising in youth than all his fellows, who has fallen a sacrifice to his rapacity?

It's fun to be debaucherous and the worst version of yourself.

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.

He who spits paan at the ceiling only blinds himself.

I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.

The third class of evils comprise those which everyone causes to himself by his own action. This is the largest class, and is far more numerous than the second class. It is especially of these evils that all men complain, - only few men are found that do not sin against themselves by this kind of evil. ...This class of evil originates in man's vices, such as excessive desire for eating, drinking, and love; indulgence in these things in undue measure, or in improper manner, or partaking of bad food. This course brings diseases and afflictions upon the body and soul alike.

It's not that I don't know that it's a bad idea. It's that, lately, bad ideas have a particular hold over me.

There's nothing romantic, nothing grand, nothing heroic, nothing brave, nothing like that about drinking. It's a real coward's death.

What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?

You don't drink and smoke that much, and womanize that much, unless you really want to be punished, I think.

Where there is no desire, there will be no industry.

I drank, smoked and did drugs to get where I'm at.

I was the laziest white kid my dad ever met.

I don't do much. I'm too lazy. That's my problem. Hang around my couch, watching the TV. Just too lazy. I realized this the other day, I get hit my a truck tomorrow - a big truck could hit me - paralyze me from the neck down. Wouldn't effect my lifestyle a bit really.

When you're thirty-five, you can't take as much booze ... and I always got a little violent on drink...So it was kind of self-destructive suicide side of me, which is resolving itself for the better, I believe, because I never enjoyed it.

The unambitious sluggard pretends that the eminence is not worth attaining, declines altogether the struggle, and calls himself a philosopher. I say he is a poor-spirited coward.

Indolent people, whatever taste they may have for society, seek eagerly for pleasure, and find nothing. They have an empty head and seared hearts.

[My] worst habit: Drinking too much Budweiser when I get angry.

Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.

From this moment on I'd dedicate my life to rock and roll and take as many drugs as possible. What could possibly go wrong?

We drink and we die and continue to drink.

I take a lull from my CamelBak and choke at its potency. It tastes like bad decisions. It's perfect.

Many young people adopt pleasures for which they have not the least taste, only because they are called by that name.... You mustallow that drunkenness, which is equally destructive to body and mind, is a fine pleasure. Gaming, that draws you into a thousand scraps, leaves you penniless, and gives you the air and manners of an outrageous madman, is another most exquisite pleasure, is it not? As to running after women, the consequences of that vice are only the loss of one's nose, the total destruction of health, and, not unfrequently, the being run through the body.

I lost my one true love. I started drinking.