Charles Bukowski Quotes

To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.

Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.

First of all, we were never not speaking. It's gotten so blown out of proportion. It was a very straightforward difference of opinion. I think because we were so private and refused to talk about it, these stories just got out of control.

With the first album, we felt people didn't really understand our band.

Sometimes how I explain myself to the media can come across in a slightly different way to how I would mean to say things.

one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.

I never write with any kind of message, and I don't think that this book, 'Goodbye, Stranger' has a message in the capital M form of the word but I do hope it makes people ask themselves questions about what they think.

One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

Meddling, smug, stupid little..." "She likes me! They always play hard to get when they like me!" "No. You do not understand. I could not have done it because I can not read or write.

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

The writer's original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader's.

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

...I will continue to underscore that I don't think authorial intent is all that important to a reading experience, and I certainly don't think the job of reading is to divine authorial intent.

fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people.

I was once told by someone wise that writing is perilous as you cannot always guarantee your words will be read in the spirit in which they were written.

Readers re-create any story to suit their own needs. They re-clothe the story in their own shirts. Put simply: just as we write the story we need to write, they read the story they need to read.

Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.

One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.

I get a lot of people complaining about my ambiguity, often in cases which there is nothing ambigous at all. As far as I can see, people read it when they were half stoned and listening to the TV. Then they come back and say gee, it's impossible to figure out what's going on in a story.

My films are misinterpreted all the time. I don't mind that. Everybody's films are misinterpreted. But there's no malice or stupidity in the people that misinterpret them. You know what you do, but someone else sees it, and they want to talk about it or write about it, and so they misinterpret them.

The meaning ... of a writer will be found not just in what he intends to say, or what he does literally say, but in the effect of his writing on living beings.

Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god.

People who read me seem to be divided into four groups: twenty-five percent like me for the right reasons; twenty-five percent like me for the wrong reasons; twenty-five percent hate me for the wrong reasons; twenty-five percent hate me for the right reasons. It's that last twenty-five percent that worries me.