Charles Bukowski Quotes

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

Comedy actually works best when you're living in an OK world, and you are pointing out the hypocrisy in apathy.

All the horror is in just this -- that there is no horror. . . .

I do get cynical, but what can you do? It doesn't make any difference.

Famously, there's not really anywhere to go after nihilism. It's not progressing toward anything, it's a statement of outrage, however brilliant.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.

Nothing fazes me anymore.

Science has killed religion. There's no hope for the future with seven billion of us on the planet, and the only thing you can do is to laugh in the face of it all.

No reason to get excited,' the thief, he kindly spoke, There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.

What of it? If I die, I die. It will be no great loss to the world, and I am thoroughly bored with life. I am like a man yawning at a ball; the only reason he does not go home to bed is that his carriage has not arrived yet.

There was nothing in this world that was not a con, suddenly I understood this. Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost.

People never think anything is anything really. I'm getting goddam sick of it.

Nothing makes sense, why should I?

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone.

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair.

Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.

Sometimes I didn't even feel like getting out of bed. I took to wearing my days-of-the-week panties out of order. It could be Monday and I'd have on underwear saying Thursday. I just didn't care.

If somebody wants to shoot up and die in front of you, more power to them. The herd has a way of thinning itself out.

It's all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for... it's all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can't you see the funny side? Why aren't you laughing?

Nothing matters. Nothing matters.

My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.

Ain't nobody gonna care enough to catch you fall.

If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.