Charles Bukowski Quotes

I was living on a loaf of bread a week.

I said to my friends that if I was going to starve, I might as well starve where the food is good.

The man who has bread to eat does not appreciate the severity of a famine.

Hunger can bring out the worst in us.

You can't brace yourself for famine if you've never known hunger.

No secret man. Just starvation, hunger and diet.

And what can we expect if we haven't any dinner, But to lose our teeth and eyelashes and keep on growing thinner?

I used to walk to the Washington Monument from North L Street Northwest. And I was so hungry at times, I would stop and look into the trash cans, and if there was a half a sandwich, I would take that sandwich and eat it. It was just a matter of survival. I didn't think much of it, but it was just the way things were.

And who is any of us, that without starvation he can go through the kingdoms of starvation?

When I see someone who is starved, they don't look alert. They don't have boundless energy. If you're too skinny, it looks like you're near death.

There is no humiliation more abusive than hunger.

I wish anyone in this world could go to his fridge and pick whatever he wants. Because the day you open your fridge and there is nothing in it, it is difficult.

My nickname was Skinabo - 'skin and bones.'

As a kid, I got three meals a day. Oatmeal, miss-a-meal and no meal.

40 percent of North Korean children suffer from stunted growth. 20 percent are underweight.

When I was eight years old, I was always starving. My brother and sister died from starvation.

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

The war years were the most difficult time of my life. There was real famine in Moscow. The water froze inside the houses. There was no heat.

Where is there beauty when you see deprivation and starvation?

Full stomachs don't believe empty ones.

Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature.

People may have to die in the country and die through starvation.

Hunger is the teacher of many.

If Victual should prove scarce, as we have not Goods or Money for any Value to send out for Corns [food grains like wheat]; so only a part of the People could be maintained: The better part would have Bread, but the more necessary part, the Laboring Men would be forced to leave the Country, or to starve in it.

Bread did not have its usual nourishing power and strength because the grain was not nourished by the warmth of summer sunshine. Hence those who ate it, even in large quantities, were hungry again after a little while. There can be no doubt that the poor wasted away when even the rich were constantly hungry.... Four pennies worth of coarse bread was not enough to feed a common man for one day. The usual kinds of meat, suitable for eating, were too scarce; horse meat was precious; plump dogs were stolen. And, according to many reports, men and women in many places secretly ate their own children....