"I think that when any creative artist gets good enough society has an Animal out There that the artist is fed to so he won't get any stronger. Creativity, no matter what you say, is somehow bound up with adversity, and when you get dangerous enough they simply take away your adversity. They've done it with the blacks, they've done it with the Chicanos, they've done it with the women, and now they're playing with me. I intend to allow them to clutch a loud, empty fart for their reward. I will be elsewhere, cleaning my toenails or reading the Racing Form."
—Charles Bukowski, letter to Charles Plymell, October 29, 1975, quoted in Living on Luck: Selected Letters 1960s-1970s, 1995
ON AMBITION
"It was true that I didn't have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?"
—Factotum, 1975
"I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn't particularly want money. I didn't know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. The thought of being something didn't only appall me, it sickened me . . . To do things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother's Day . . . was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep."
—Ham on Rye, 1982
"The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go."
—Ham on Rye, 1982
"This is a world where everybody's gotta do something. Ya know, somebody laid down this rule that everybody's gotta do something, they gotta be something. You know, a dentist, a glider pilot, a narc, a janitor, a preacher, all that . . . Sometimes I just get tired of thinking of all the things that I don't wanna do. All the things that I don't wanna be. Places I don't wanna go, like India, like getting my teeth cleaned. Save the whale, all that, I don't understand that . . ."
—Barfly, 1987
ON THE BEAT GENERATION
"Now, the original Beats, as much as they were knocked, had the Idea. But they were flanked and overwhelmed by fakes, guys with nicely clipped beards, lonely-hearts looking for free ass, limelighters, rhyming poets, homosexuals, bums, sightseers—the same thing that killed the Village. Art can't operate in Crowds. Art does not belong at parties, nor does it belong at Inauguration Speeches."
—Letter to Jon Webb, 1962, Screams from the Balcony, 1993
ON CENSORSHIP
"Censorship exists due to the fact that our educational institutions don't educate and the Church is still around dragging its feet one thousand years behind the times. False morality is the disease of a people who are told what to think and how to act from an early beginning; few ever use their own thought processes to question what they are taught. Talk about the living dead, they crawl like flies upon this turd of an earth."
—Letter to William Packard, August 1985, Reach for the Sun: Selected Letters 1978-1994, Volume 3, 1999
ON DEATH
"There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die."
—The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, 1998
"We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
—Attributed
ON DRINKING
"That's the problem with drinking, I thought as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen."
—Women, 1978
"Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now."
—Interview, London Magazine, December 1974-January 1975, Sunlight Here I Am, 2003
"That's the problem with drinking, I thought as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen."
—Women, 1978
"Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat."
—Factotum, 1975
ON GOVERNMENTS
"are there good governments and bad governments? no, there are only bad governments and worse governments. will there be the flash of light and heat that rips us apart one night while we are screwing or crapping or reading the comic strips or pasting blue-chip stamps into a book? instant death is nothing new, nor is mass instant death new, but we've improved the product; we've had these centuries of knowledge and culture and discovery to work with; the libraries are fat and crawling and overcrowded with books; great paintings sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars; medical science is transplanting the human heart; you can't tell a madman from a sane one upon the streets, and suddenly we find our lives, again, in the hands of idiots, the bombs may never drop; the bombs might drop, eeney, meeney, miney, mo . . . now if you'll forgive me, dear readers, I'll get back to the whores and the horses and the booze, while there's time. if these contain death, then, to me, it seems far less offensive to be responsible for your own death than the other kind which is brought to you fringed with phrases of Freedom and Democracy and Humanity and/or any or all of that Bullshit."
—"Politics is Like Trying to Screw a Cat in the Ass," The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories, 1983
ON HISTORY
"We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the local bar."
—Notes of a Dirty Old Man, 1969
ON THE HUMAN RACE
"The human race had always disgusted me. Essentially, what made them disgusting was the family-relationship illness, which included marriage, exchange of power and aid, which like a sore, a leprosy, became then: your next door neighbor, your neighborhood, your district, your city, your county, your state, your nation . . . everybody grabbing each other's assholes in the honeycomb of survival out of fear-animalistic stupidity."
—"The Great Zen Wedding," Tales of Ordinary Madness, 1983
"I foresaw future problems: as a recluse I couldn't bear traffic. It had nothing to do with jealousy, I simply disliked people, crowds, anywhere, except at my readings. People diminished me, they sucked me dry. 'Humanity, you never had it from the beginning.' That was my motto."
—Women, 1978
ON LEISURE TIME
"This is very important—to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you're gonna lose everything. Whether you're an actor, anything, a housewife . . . there has to be great pauses between highs, where you do nothing at all. You just lay on a bed and stare at the ceiling. This is very, very important . . . just do nothing at all, very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That's why they're all totally mad, frustrated, angry and hateful. In the old days, before I was married, or knew a lot of women, I would just pull down all the shades and go to bed for three or four days. I'd get up to shit. I'd eat a can of beans, go back to bed, just stay there for three or four days. Then I'd put on my clothes and I'd walk outside, and the sunlight was brilliant, and the sounds were great. I felt powerful, like a recharged battery. But you know the first bring-down? The first human face I saw on the sidewalk, I lost half my charge right there. This monstrous, blank, dumb, unfeeling face, charged up with capitalism—the 'grind.' And you went, 'Oooh! That took half away.' But it was still worth it, I had half left. So, yeah, leisure. And I don't mean having profound thoughts. I mean having no thoughts at all. Without thoughts of progress, without any self-thoughts of trying to further yourself. Just . . . like a slug. It's beautiful."
—Interview, Vol. XVII, No. 19, September 1987
ON LIFE
"It is more than difficult for me to survive. My present job has me by the throat and I don't know how much more I can take. I have no special trade and am getting old. It will all end somewhere down the line: an old dirty demolished German pig, sitting on a doorstep looking in the sand for a razor. Life is for achievement? Even Hegel's achievements are paling. See how we waste? Life is avoidance of pain until death. Life is finding that love between 2 people only goes one way. One is always the master, the other the slave. Life is Tuesday afternoon in a cage. I do not talk about life. It gets silly. Death is the master."
—Letter to Ann Bauman, November 22, 1962, Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970, 1993
ON LIQUOR STORES
"I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year."
—Women, 1978
ON MOVIES
"Want me to name [my favorite films]? 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' 'Elephant Man,' 'Eraserhead,' 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'—that's a classic. [Akira] Kurosawa and those great battle scenes. And all those great samurai films where guys are chopping heads off."
—Film Comment interview, 1987
ON PERSONAL HYGIENE
"Nothing is worse than to finish a good shit, then reach over and find the toilet paper container empty. Even the most horrible human being on earth deserves to wipe his ass."
—Factotum, 1975
ON POETRY
"I have just read the immortal poems of the ages and come away dull. I don't know who's at fault; maybe it's the weather, but I sense a lot of pretense and poesy footwork: I am writing a poem, they seem to say, look at me! Poetry must be forgotten; we must get down to raw paint, splatter. I think a man should be forced to write in a roomful of skulls, bits of raw meat hanging, nibbled by fat slothy rats, the sockets musicless staring into the wet ether-sogged, love-sogged, hate-sogged brain, and forevermore the rockets and flares and chains of history winging like bats, bat-flap and smoke and skulls ringing in the beer. Yes."
—Letter to Jory Sherman, 1961, Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970, 1993
ON THE RACETRACK
"I piss away time and money at the racetrack because I am insane—I am hoping to make enough money so I will not have to work any longer in slaughterhouses, in post offices, at docks, in factories . . . After losing a week's pay in four hours it is very difficult to come to your room and face the typewriter and fabricate a lot of lacy bullshit. But I certainly wouldn't suggest the racetrack as the incubator and inspirer of poetry. I just say it might work for me—sometimes. Like beer, or screwing a good woman, cigars, or Mahler with good wine and the lights out, sitting there naked watching the cars go by. My suggestion to all or any is to stay away from the racetrack. It is one of Man's neatest traps."
—Interview, Los Angeles Free Press, March 3, 1967, Sunlight Here I Am, 2003
ON REJECTION SLIPS
"And rejections are no hazard; they are better than gold. Just think what type of miserable career you would be today if all your works had been accepted."
—Letter to Jory Sherman, April 1, 1960, Screams from the Balcony, 1993
ON RELATIONSHIPS
"Human relationships didn't work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death . . . in a cesspool."
—Women, 1978
"I was naturally a loner, content just to live with a woman, eat with her, sleep with her, walk down the street with her. I didn't want conversation, or to go anywhere except the racetrack or the boxing matches. I didn't understand t.v. I felt foolish paying money to go into a movie theatre and sit with other people to share their emotions. Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateur drunks, the bores."
—Women, 1978
ON RESERVOIR DOGS
"This is in response to all the hype regarding RESERVOIR DOGSHIT. Tarantino's student film is probably the mot overrated in the last twenty years. Give us a break! What's all the praise about anyway? Like I said . . . the film should be retitled RESERVOIR DOGSHIT. I regret paying the $7, when I could have instead rented a couple of tapes starring the real thing: Jimmy Cagney, Eddie G. Robinson or even Bogey."
—Letter to Film Threat, 1992
ON SKID ROW
"Those guys down there [in skid row] had no problems with women, income tax, landlords, burial expenses, dentists, time payments, car repairs, or with climbing into a voting booth and pulling the curtain closed."
—Factotum, 1975
ON SOLITUDE
"I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food and water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me."
—Factotum, 1975
"I wasn't a misanthrope and I wasn't a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself."
—Ham on Rye, 1982
ON TAKING A BEER SHIT
"There was nothing really as glorious as a good beer shit—I mean after drinking twenty or twenty-five beers the night before. The odor of a beer shit like that spread all around and stayed for a good hour-and-a-half. It made you realize that you were really alive."
—Ham on Rye, 1982
ON TELEVISION
"We got cable TV here, and the first thing we switched on happened to be 'Eraserhead.' I said, 'Oh, this cable TV has opened a whole new world. We're gonna be sitting in front of this thing for centuries. What next?' So starting with 'Eraserhead' we sit here, click, click, click—nothing."
—Interview, Film Comment, 1987
ON WOMEN
"I must have been mad. Unshaven. Undershirt full of cigarette holes. My only desire was to have more than one bottle on the dresser. I was not fit for the world and the world was not fit for me and I had found some others like myself, and most of them were women, women most men would never want to be in the same room with, but I adored them, they inspired me. I play-acted, swore, pranced about in my underwear telling them how great I was, but only I believed that. They just hollered, 'Fuck off! Pour some more booze!' Those ladies from hell, those ladies in hell with me."
—Hollywood, 1989
ON WORK
"The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn't interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative."
—Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews & Encounters 1963-1993, edited by David Stephen Calonne, 2003