Charles Bukowski Quotes

Sometimes we fall in love with the idea of a person and have trouble seeing the real thing.

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

It's a funny thing: my name in Arabic means hope, so I suppose I have to live by that principle. Hope is desire, feeling, and investing in a projection of something that doesn't yet exist. At its best, you witness its alchemy in your life, turning something that was once in the mind into reality. At its worst, it's delusion.

Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.

People think that dreams are better than reality but this is not always the case; sometimes, because you dream too much, you are unable to see what you have in front of your very eyes.

Things always look better when you haven't seen them.

The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.

Nothing that you want ever is what you think it is.

Imagination which comes into play in falling in love is different from any other. Certainly in my case, and I've fallen in love all my life, one imagines the person to be as you want them to be. They frequently turn out to be someone different, for better or worse.

I always thought that the U.S. was just amazing, and it was just a dream. I thought it was Heaven. Coming here a couple years ago, you know, the U.S. is still nice, but it's not like what I thought it was going to be.

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, - attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.

Men are always doomed to be duped, not so much by the arts of the other as by their own imagination. They are always wooing goddesses, and marrying mere mortals.

Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too?

People expect too much. People who expect heaven always fall into hell - that is the law. Expect heaven and hell is certain. Don't expect heaven and there will never be any hell.

Desire is not what you see, but what you imagine.

Our greatest illusion is disillusion. We imagine that we are disillusioned with life, when the truth is that we have not even begun to live.

"Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says. The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all."

We are never either so fortunate or so misfortunate as we imagine.

In many ways we are a dream for people, not a reality. That counts in your mind. It shows how much you can touch people, and as much as you can try to give those people somehow it is nothing compared to what they live in their own mind, in their dreams, for you.

The truth is rarely as dreadful or as terrifying as what one imagines.

Because nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.

Sometimes it's just enough for me to have the idea. I don't need to see it through to the end. When it actually happens, I'm always disappointed because it's never like what I imagined in my head. When an idea becomes a reality, then it's a job. I'd rather just think about it.

Imagining something is better than remembering something.