My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don’t want it smoothed out. Charles Bukowski Read Quote
When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer. Charles Bukowski Read Quote
I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance. Charles Bukowski Read Quote
What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper. Charles Bukowski Read Quote
Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong. Charles Bukowski Read Quote
When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can’t write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the ‘i’s’ small. Charles Bukowski Read Quote
I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard. Charles Bukowski Read Quote
Much publishing is done through politics, friends, and natural stupidity. Charles Bukowski Read Quote
Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‘Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?’ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds. Charles Bukowski Read Quote
Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me. Charles Bukowski Read Quote
