Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski
Henry Charles Bukowskiwas an American poet, novelist, and short story writer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth16 August 1920
CityAndernach, Germany
CountryUnited States of America
taken wine air
the last cigarettes are smoked, the loaves are sliced, and lest this be taken for wry sorrow, drown the spider in wine. you are much more than simply dead: I am a dish for your ashes, I am a fist for your vanished air. the most terrible thing about life is finding it gone.
sleep air tunnels
There's no light at the end of the tunnel, there isn't even a tunnel. The best thing I can do is get drunk and listen to classical music. Or sleep and wait for death to get closer. Leaving this will not be a horrible thing. Yet I'm glad, somehow, that I threw my words in the air: confetti, celebrating nothing.
airplane passing overhead
I heard an airplane passing overhead. I wished I was on it.
friendship prejudice sharing
That is what friendship means. Sharing the prejudice of experience.
drinking wine writing
I write right off the typer. I call it my "machinegun." I hit it hard, usually late at night while drinking wine and listening to classical music on the radio and smoking mangalore ganesh beedies.
writing agony sweat
I seldom know what I'm going to write when I sit down. There isn't much agony and sweat of the human spirit involved in doing it. The writing's easy, it's the living that is sometimes difficult.
mean writing night
A dry period for me means perhaps going two or three nights without writing. I probably have dry periods but I'm not aware of them and I go on writing, only the writing probably isn't much good.
laughing magic lines
Hemingway and Saroyan had the line, the magic of it. The problem was that Hemingway didn't know how to laugh and Saroyan was filled with sugar.
young wells
I guess for me Hemingway is a lot like it is for others: he goes down well when we are young.
lucky
In a more universal sense, we only get one thing. You know...a head stone if we're lucky; if not, green grass.
writing solitude splits
Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I've had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I'm not writing than when I am.
notebook thinking ideas
I don't carry notebooks and I don't consciously store ideas. I try not to think that I am a writer and I am pretty good at doing that. I don't like writers, but then I don't like insurance salesmen either.
trying tough ass
The role of the poet is almost nothing...drearily nothing. And when he steps outside of his boots and tries to get tough as our dear Ezra [Pound] did, he will get his pink little ass slapped.
poet
Figuring the average poet starts at 16, I am 23.