Charles Bukowski Quotes

Whatever I'm reading at the moment seems to influence whatever I'm writing.

I learned long ago, back with 'Lover Revealed,' that my job is to sit at the computer, shut up and type. Otherwise? The pictures and the voices go away!

Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine.

When I'm writing I've been playing something for a couple of hours and I'm almost in a trance. At two or three in the morning you can actually see bits inspiration floating about and grab them.

I usually don't write at night, but there are times where I wake up at 3 in the morning and write all night.

Most people wait for the muse to turn up. That's terribly unreliable. I have to sit down and pursue the muse by attempting to work.

I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.

I enjoy bluegrass, folk, gospel, and classical. I don't listen to music when I write. I sometimes listen to music just before I sit down to write.

A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.

I wake up with the story in my head, so I really like to be at my desk about five minutes after I wake up. So I don't get dressed. I put on a bathrobe, I make tea and sit at my desk.

When I first started writing, I used to listen to music all the time because it would make time pass more quickly. And then I started to wonder if the music wasn't affecting my writing in ways that I didn't necessarily intend.

I find that when I write, I need things to be quiet, but when I design, I can't bear it if it's quiet.

I'm always a great student of writers' work habits. Balzac sat at his desk dressed in a monk's robe, and he always had to have a rotten apple on his desk. The smell of the apple inspired him somehow.

I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'

To me, every episode is like a song, and every season is like an album. There's that part of the day when you first get the idea and you say, "This could be really funny." And you sit down and you write it. There's just something that happens there that doesn't happen when you really give it a lot of time beforehand.

I try not to take on the weight or the burden of it. Once it's on the paper, I try to leave it, because I want to surrender to what I'm supposed to write about.

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

I tend to write first thing, and then do my drawing later. I like to draw at night. But often I go for long stretches without drawing, because I'm trying to figure out what I'm writing.

Left to it's own devices, writing is like weather. It has a drama, a form, a force to it that shapes the day. Just as good rain clears the air, a good writing day clears the psyche. There is something very right about simply letting yourself write. And the way to do that is to begin, to begin where you are.

I've dedicated a lot of my life as a writer to understanding how to hear the divine voice, or the music of the spheres, or whatever it is that we do when we're making art, making something out of nothing. Figuring out how to do that is much more important than knowing how to execute a good line. I don't think about that anymore, I just write.

I think it just has to do with getting older and getting better at what it was I was doing, and that I could take something small and kind of take my time with it. I think actually what that has to do with is I quit drinking. Before that I told myself I could only drink if I was - if I was writing, I had to be drinking. So I was on a timer, because eventually you get too drunk to write.

I always write the same way. I always write with a yellow pad and a ballpoint pen on my bed. And then I go and type it up afterwards. I've always done that. Those things become habitual.

There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.

But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.

When you're sitting down and you're blocked and you just start writing and something in your mind just clicks, you start seeing connections and so on, you really do feel like you're channeling something else.