Charles Bukowski Quotes

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

If you want to know why all writers are a little crazy read 'The Midnight Disease' by Alice W. Flaherty. She talks about the drive to write, writer's block, and the creative brain. I know what's wrong with me!

Although I take the medication, which has made a huge impact on my life in a positive way, still, honestly, when I'm a bit sick is when I'm at my most creative.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

It's hard to predict and to say what goes on inside the minds of an artist, but that's what makes them an artist. That sense of creativity. That thing that makes them tick is probably the very thing that pushes them to the extremes that sometimes can cause, you know, fatalities and things that, you know, that end up not being good.

We know that creative people have all sorts of demons.

I think that I'm so psychotic and so mentally ill that if I could tap into that I could do something really interesting.

The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.

But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it.

Art is born of humiliation.

I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

Human beings have speculated about the relationship between inspiration and insanity for centuries.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

For me, creation can only come out of a certain kind of unhappiness. They say in Japan, this thing like the hungry spirit - the hungry mind - is what gets you going forward.

Sometimes you don't really know what you're going to write about. I mean, there's times where you get into a writing room and it's a complete flop. And then there's times where you get to a writing room and you're like, 'Oh, I'm just on a roll.'

I could write songs on the beach, but the interior darkness, we have it all. We have it.

I am a better writer for having fewer demons, and I am more curious about the world and the people in it. So those of you thinking you might need your demons in order to be creative: I beg to differ.

Rage is to writers what water is to fish.

Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well.

I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.

A man climbs a mountain because it is there. An artist makes a work of art because it is not there.

My paintings are only the ashes of my art