Charles Bukowski Quotes

Every single thing I do... is just me surviving.

You've got the same rhythm every day just to keep you going. So once that rhythm is broken, it's kind of hard to get back with it when you got a lot of things going on.

A man must have something to cling to. Without that he is as a pea vine sprawling in search of a trellis.... I was all asprawl, clinging to Beauty, which is a very restless trellis.

Sanity is a compromise.

I like playing someone with a certain stability at the periphery of the madness.

Patterns of repetition govern each day, week, year, and lifetime. 'Personal habits' is one term we use to describe the most common of these repeated patterns. But I say these habits are sacred because they give deliberate structure to our lives. Structure gives us a sense of security. And that sense of security is the ground of meaning.

I think it's very important to cry in the shower and not in front of them. They need to know that everything's going to be all right, even when you're not sure it is.

I can only be the madman that I've been so long.

Athletes can be a very stressy bunch. We like routine. I'm a very routined person. If something changes, I really don't like it.

If this world hasn't made you semi-mad, then you ain't living in it.

I think if something's wrong with me, I just kind of work through it. That's my mentality.

Some people have these small, positive schemes for survival, a kind of strength that I am attracted to, maybe because I'm prone to the blues.

I think it's probably a good thing to be considered stable, but with a capacity for madness.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

I told the doctor I was overtired, anxiety-ridden, compulsively active, constantly depressed, with recurring fits of paranoia. Turns out I'm normal.

We're all not quite as sane as we pretend to be.

And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential — I know it.

I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful.

For a while, I thought I was going mad. At last, I became reconciled to my despair. The medications helped, too, I thought, sir.

I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.

Sanity brings pain but madness is a vile thing.

If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere average intellect it usually sent mad.

In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagined past.

...had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples.

In an insane world, sanity made very little sense.