Charles Bukowski Quotes

In my lowest moments, the only reason I didn't commit suicide was that I knew I wouldn't be able to drink any more if I was dead.

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

I'm just going to crumble like a wreck. I'll go home, become an alcoholic and maybe! jump of a bridge.

My selective memory of what drinking was like told me that standing at the bar in a pub, on a summer's evening with a long, tall glass of lager and lime was heaven, and I chose not to remember the nights on which I had sat with a bottle of vodka, a gram of coke and a shotgun, contemplating suicide.

Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other.

How terrible to be alcoholic. You just want to quietly soothe and maybe poison yourself, but you end up poisoning those around you as well, like trying to commit suicide with a gas oven and unwittingly murdering your neighbors.

My life sucks when I’m only half-aware of it. If I quit drinking and saw what it’s really like, I’d probably jump off a bridge.

What stops you killing yourself when you're intoxicated out of your mind is the thought that once you're dead you won't be able to drink any more.

I know a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up to the day he killed himself.

You can't drown yourself in drink. I've tried, you float.

I took a bottle of pills. I'd been in Europe and I had a lot of absinthe and I was just drinking and drinking, trying to, you know, just shut my body down.

Black people are killing themselves with alcohol ... it is a scourge of our neighborhoods. It's a disease that feeds on our people.

When I was drinking I was thinking I was having a good time but it came back twice as bad, the depression. It was just a vicious circle - drinking, not caring about myself - and it gave me a bad low.

It was my Fat Elvis period. I was eating and drinking like a pig. I was depressed and I was crying out for help. It's real. And I meant it.

Drinking isn't necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can't drink without thinking you're killing yourself.

The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help they have no hope.

Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, and those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied with drink.

Alcoholism is the only disease that you can get yelled at for having.

I'd be in my hotel room, smoking too much, drinking, going to clubs, just being numb. That was being in jail to me. I wasn't happy at all on the streets. That was the addict speaking.

Alcohol is an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind.

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

I drink to forget I drink.

In Stratford you either turn into an alcoholic or you better write.

This is the way I look when I'm sober. That's enough to make a person drink, wouldn't you say?

If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I'd have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven't even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.