Charles Bukowski Quotes

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

The lamp you lighted in the olden time Will show you my heart's-blood beating through the rhyme: A poet's journal, writ in fire and tears... Then slow deliverance, with the gaps of years.

Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books!

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

I just wanted Sadness to be true, to come from a real place. I tried to work from the inside out, going from my gut all the time. I didn't over-analyze it. I just did it.

It's going to sound cliche, but I started acting as an emotional outlet.

Creating something beautiful out of pain helps ease the pain. So, that's kind of how I got to songwriting - quite honestly out of desperation.

If you're making something tangible, whether it's clothing, a song, a piece of art... when you create something that's outside of yourself you take a bit of the pain and it's released, you let it out a little bit. That's my Oprah Winfrey moment.

Social media gives a lot of people a platform where they can express their feelings. I like to do mine through songs. I let info build up. In some way, it translates into paper whenever I sit down.

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration

One of the springs of poetry is joy.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.

I find I cannot exist without Poetry

Sometimes only poetry can say it. I think there's just this deeper language, and away of putting your world back together again and breaking through barriers.

The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.

Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.

. . . it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.

For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing.

Time sped. And the poet through sorrow Became like his suffering kind. Again he toiled over his poems To lighten the grief of his mind.

The poets down here don't write nothin' at all, they just stand back and let it all be.

The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands.