Charles Bukowski Quotes

I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.

Unbeing dead isn't being alive.

If we don't know life, how can we know death?

I'm very comfortable with the nature of life and death, and that we come to an end. What's most difficult to imagine is that those dreams and early yearnings and desires of childhood and adolescence will also disappear. But who knows? Maybe you become part of the eternal whatever.

There's only two things. There's life, and there's death.

Once you're alive, you can't ever be dead.

One day all of us will die but - and this is the important thing - we are not dead yet.

There are so many ways to be alive, but only one way to be dead.

The real question is not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you are alive before death.

Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist.

We die, and we do not die.

The truth is, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.

Death is like taking an intermission when you can't come back. I like living and being around.

However and wherever we are, we must live as if we will never die.

To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.

Life is but a moment, death also is but another.

Life and death have been lacking in my life.

Afterlife, in my mind, is pretty much nothing. This is it. This is what we get, for me.

If you haven't understood that if you are born you die, you scarcely deserve to be able to be alive.

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.

All men die. You may say: 'Is that encouraging?' Surely yes, for when a man dies, his blunders, which are of the form, all die with him, but the things in him that are part of the life never die, although the form be broken.