Charles Bukowski Quotes

When I was young, I would write all the time. Novels, plays, and poems. It's like a disease - my life is filled with fantasies, and I have to write them all down.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

Writing is like a 'lust,' or like 'scratching when you itch.' Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

Once you start writing something obsessively, it's almost like someone has to rip it from your hands in order for you to put it down.

I write, I write, I always write.

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.

I'm always writing. I'm an obsessive. It's not because I'm a disciplined person. It's because I'm crazy about it.

I have a writing addiction.

I am a compulsive writer.

My identity is based around being a writer. I can't not write. It's a compulsion.

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.

I can't not write, if I don't then I get really depressed.

I've tried to quit writing several times, but I enjoy it too much.

I'm like a junkie for writing.

It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.

My feeling is that writing is, for me, a pathological condition. That could sound like a mystical experience, and it may be a mystical experience, but I have learnt just to go with it.

Being a writer was never a choice, it was an irresistible compulsion.

Once I started to write, it was like all the lights came on. I was always making up stories in my head. I was a daydreamer. I didn't start as a child, but once I started, I couldn't stop. It was compulsive.

I think I would die if I couldn't get to the typewriter every day. I really need that.

I don't write these stories for the rewards that come back to me. I write them because I have to write them. It's a sickness on some level. It's a compulsion.

Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.

I love writing. I never feel really comfortable unless I am either actually writing or have a story going. I could not stop writing.

I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.

I love writing, and I think I'm kind of a workaholic. I'm happiest when I'm working.

When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.