Charles Bukowski Quotes

Is an artist much more than a beggar?

I am, as they say, the classic starving artist.

Poe was plagued and haunted most of all by something pretty banal: poverty. Probably the most eccentric decision in life was to become a writer in an age when making a living at it was nearly impossible.

A writer who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination is continually coquetting with starvation.

I'm a writer. I write not only for a living, I write because I'm a writer.

Somehow, the French got this idea of the starving artist. Very romantic, except it's not so romantic for the starving artist.

I always wanted to be an artist, but I didn't really know how someone could make a life out it.

It's hard to live just by selling paintings.

I was pushing for a career in poetry and of course the received wisdom was that you would never make a living at it.

All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.

If you don't believe what I'm telling you, then ask yourself this: would any decent, kind-hearted individual become a writer? Of course not.

Real seriousness in regard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

The starving poet business is no good nowadays.

Every book is a kind of struggle, and it's a miracle when it comes out.

Writing is so hard. Why would you be a writer if you weren't really good at it? If you could be anything else, why would you be a writer?

I wanted to be an artist, because it's a much better scam than being an architect.

The profession of letters is, after all, the only one in which one can make no money without being ridiculous.

Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.

There's nothing more difficult than a line.

Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job.

The thing about being a writer is that you never have to ask, 'Am I doing something that's worthwhile?' Because even if you fail at it, you know that it's worth doing.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

Gentlemen, I would rather have written those lines than take Quebec tomorrow.

I know from experience that to one who thinks much and feels deeply, it often seems that he has only to put down his thoughts and feelings in order to produce something altogether out of the common; yet as soon as he sets to work he falls into a certain mannerism of style and common phraseology; his thoughts do not come spontaneously, and one might almost say that it is not the mind that directs the pen, but the pen leads the mind into common, empty artificiality.