Charles Bukowski Quotes

I'm crazy and I don't pretend to be anything else.

I'll say it loud and say it proud. I'm completely insane.

Mix an anorexic body with a heart made of pure fire and you are going to go with a savagery that's hard to explain.

Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.

My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.

The raging fire which urged us on was scorching us; it would have burned us had we failed to restrain it.

True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

Nobody, who looks at a shard of flint lying beneath a rock ledge, or who finds a splintered log by the side of the road would ever find magic in their solitude. But in the right circumstances, if you bring them together, you can start a fire that consumes the world.

Love lights more fire than hate extinguishes.

Love and hatred are not blind, but are blinded by the fire they bear within themselves.

Fire is to represent truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth.

I am burning. If anyone lacks tinder, let him set his rubbish ablaze with my fire.

It is difficult to say which is the greatest evil--to have too violent passions, or to be wholly devoid of them. Controlled with firmness, guided by discretion, and hallowed by the imagination, the passions are the vivifiers and quickeners of our being. Without passion there can be no energy of character. Indeed, the passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways, and dangerous only in one--through their excess.

In the church of my heart the choir is on fire

There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us ... like a fire kindled within our being to which everything else in us is mere fuel.

A woman isn't all that different from a bonfire. A fire's a beautiful thing, right? Something you can't take your eyes off, when it's burning. If you can keep it contained, it'll throw light and heat for you. It's only when it gets out of control that you have to go on the offensive.

Writers on the subject of August Strindberg have hitherto omitted to mention that he could not write. ... Strindberg, who was neither a good nor a wise man, had a stroke of luck. He went mad. He lost the power of inhibition. Everything down to the pettiest suspicion that the dog had been given the leanest mutton chop, poured out of his lips. Men of his weakness and sensuality are usually, from their sheer brutishness, unable to express themselves. But Strindberg was mad and articulate. That is what makes him immortal.

Fire that's closest kept burns most of all.

Man is ice to truth and fire to falsehood.

The great sins and fires break out of me like the terrible leaves from the bough in the violent spring. I am a walking fire, I am all leaves.

I like the color red because it's a fire. And I see myself as always being on fire.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you

To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze.

Shams, my body is a candle touched with fire.

Thus far, everything I've made has come out of my really feeling it, out of the fire of my life.