Charles Bukowski Quotes

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.

Rap lyrics are really the only thing I've ever written.

My dad was a poet. He saw the world through unique glasses, with simplicity, spirituality, and humor.

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.

I've just begun to dare to think I perhaps am a bit of an artist.

I look at you and I write down what I hear.

Reason is a fine thing, but it is not the only thing available to a writer. It's just part of the arsenal of many things available to a storyteller. Revelation, for example.

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

My parents are creative on many fronts, and they pushed me to be that way, too. They wanted me to write, actually.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

The pen is very quick for getting stuff from your brain to the page. I can do hieroglyphics in the margin. There are days when I really enjoy the flow of ink. I mean, nice pen, ink straight on to the page.

There is something magical in seeing what you can do, what texture and tone and colour you can produce merely with a pen point and a bottle of ink.

I don't see the world unless I see it in ink.

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.

To be a writer is to connect and to play and to attempt to see clearly and understand. It astounds me regularly that feeling things deeply and writing them down is basically my job description.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

I was always drawing eyes, even as a child. Eyes fascinated me.

Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.

Art is beauty, the perpetual invention of detail, the choice of words, the exquisite care of execution.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I'm a writer... I write.