Charles Bukowski Quotes

Screenwriting and the movie stuff could all disappear tomorrow, but to sit down with my laptop and still tell stories is my day job. I didn't believe I'd actually get to do it for a living.

Writing is such a 'pretend' profession. Nobody is counting on you at all. You can't 'pretend' to be a lawyer or a teacher. It takes a lot of grit to continue.

Writing anything is terribly hard but, alas for me, because I am addicted, a heck of a lot of fun. I often am sorry I ever started writing prose, because it is so hard. But I can't stop.

I love telling stories and I love writing so the fact that I can do it professionally is something that I've always been very grateful for.

I like the idea of being a working writer, not of saying that it's going to take me 30 years to write my magnum opus.

I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.

I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.

I have written more than 100 novels and novellas since 1983 - I was first published in 1985. There was an overlap of three years with my teaching career, but finally I felt good enough about my writing career to quit teaching and write full time.

Writers don't retire. I will always be a writer.

I was a writer before 'Eat, Pray, Love,' and I'll be a writer after it's over. It's what I want to do for the rest of my life.

Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

You don't make a decision about being a writer. There was a point, aged 21, when it became clear that this is who I am. The choice is how good you are going to be at it and how hard you are going to work.

Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.

I always knew I wanted to be a writer.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

You won't make a living writing until you learn to write when you don't want to.

I'm a compulsive storyteller, an avid reader, and have always nurtured the secret goal of spending my life as a writer.

Yes, it's hard to write. But it's harder not to.

As a youngster, I think I said I wanted to be a journalist, but that's a disguise for being a writer.

I've figured out in the course of my life that the one thing I'm good at doing is writing books, and it would be crazy to trade that in for something else.

With due apologies to Shakespeare, some people are born writers, some people achieve it after a lot of hard work, some people have a writing career thrust upon them. I am in that last group.

I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.

I have always loved to read, and now that I have penned 10 novels and a few magazine articles, I have fallen seriously in love with writing stories and seeing them go out into the world. It's magical, you know?

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.