Charles Bukowski Quotes

Age gives you a great sense of proportion. You can be very hard on yourself when you're younger but now I just think 'well everybody's absolutely mad and I'm doing quite well'.

You get clarity as you get sober, and you get clarity as you get older.

Age does not depend upon years, but upon temperament and health. Some men are born old, and some never grow so.

Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

My advice would be not to write until after 35. You need some experience, and for life to knock you about a bit. Growing up is so hard you probably won't have much emotion to spare anyway.

I never thought getting older would be so great. But when it comes to depression, I have experienced less the older I've gotten.

I've gotten crankier in my old age.

When I passed the age of 50, I learned how to control my emotions.

I'm younger than Rod Stewart and Bruce Springsteen, but I'm still getting up there in age.

I don't understand people getting depressed about getting older. There is nothing you can do about it, so you might as well embrace it.

With age comes common sense and wisdom.

That's the privilege of old age: You don't have to remember.

People say that if you're still angry at 52, you're not an angry young man, just a grumpy old git.

The best I can say is that it's better for me to write about despair and darkness than to be incapable of getting off the sofa. It's better to write about suicide than to contemplate it too heavily.

I was always proud of being tough-minded, and I think I still am, but in my old age I've got a little softer in the head, and that's all right.

I softened in my old age.

I guess I'm depressed. I don't know. I can't explain it. Part of it is the irritability of being 84, and part of it is being not as physically strong as I once was. And part of it is my misunderstanding, I think, of what's going on in the world.

As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.

Profundity of thought belongs to youth, clarity of thought to old age.

And Levin, a happy father and a man in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord, lest he be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun, for fear of shooting himself. But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living.

Do we all become garrulous and confidential as we approach the gates of old age? Is it that we instinctively feel, and cannot help asserting, our one advantage over the younger generation, which has so many over us? - the one advantage of time!

Running has made being depressed impossible. If I'm going through something emotional and just go outside for a run, you can rest assured I'll come back with clarity.

Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.

What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The lustre of the eye? Is it for Beauty to forego her wreath? Yes; but not this alone.

That's the one thing I have over any twenty-one-year-old: a proud history of accumulated neuroses. That's the game in which I'm da man.