Charles Bukowski Quotes

The only thing that makes me crazier than writing is not writing.

Nothing has more strength than dire necessity.

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

I have no regrets. I think we did right, and we couldn't have done differently. In wartime, it was a desperate time .... When you are in a war to the death, I don't think you stand around and ask, is it right?

Here's the bottom line; writers write. Sometimes words flow easily. Sometimes it's like sloughing through mud. Either way a professional writer keeps writing.

Perhaps one would be wise when young even to avoid thinking of oneself as a writer - for there's something a little stopped and satisfied, too healthy, in that. Better to think of writing, of what one does as an activity, rather than an identity - to write, I write; we write; to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun; to keep working at the thing, at all hours, in all places, so that your life does not become a pose, a pornography of wishing.

Books arent written on whim or promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writings a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back.

Art is a way of survival.

Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write.

...The task is overwhelming, and the chance is slight. We must take the chance or die.

Morality is a luxury we can't afford out here. There's no right or wrong, just survival or death.

The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

I write as a function. Without it I would fall ill and die. It's as much a part of one as the liver or intestine, and just about as glamorous.

There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

Perhaps, it is just as well to be rash and foolish for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would be written at all. It might be better to ask yourself "Why?" afterwards than before. Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

I'm an actor who loves to direct film, if I find something that I'm compelled to do and want to spend three or four years doing. I really love the process, though. I might have to just say, "Yeah, I want to direct that," because I want to direct something, but that's just not the way my being is. It's got to be a necessity for me, otherwise I'll just keep acting.

I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.

I let the music set the tone of the lyrics.I allowed myself to write more about relationships and emotions, in a girly way almost.

Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.

Many writers-in-waiting spend a lot of time avoiding the work at hand. The most common way to avoid writing is by procrastination. This is the writer's greatest enemy. There is little to say about it except that once you decide to write every day, you must make yourself sit at the desk or table for the required period whether or not you are putting down words. Make yourself take the time even if the hours seem fruitless. Ideally, after a few days or weeks of being chained to the desk, you will submit to the story that must be told.

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.