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 DRINKING
"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
"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 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
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 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 AMBITION
"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 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
"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
com a filha, Marina
majestic, majic
infinite
my little girl is
sun
on the carpet-
out the door
picking a flower, ha!
an old man,
battle-wrecked,
emerges from his
chair
and she looks at me
but only sees
love,
ha!, and I become
quick with the world
and love right back
just like I was meant
to do.
Charles Bukowski, Marina
mesa de trabalho, Circa (1971)
ON ARTISTS
"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
—Charles Bukowski, letter to Charles Plymell, October 29, 1975, quoted in Living on Luck: Selected Letters 1960s-1970s, 1995
(...)
A mim interessa-me – sempre me interessou, aliás – o obsceno, o excesso, a náusea, o nojo... tanto quanto as coisas belas. Precisamente por isso, eu creio: pela poética que assiste ao belo no seu estado mais absoluto, isto é, sem nada excluir ou deixar de fora; o belo no exacto instante em que ainda se deixa contemplar intacto; o belo nessa fracção de segundo ainda anterior à queda irreparável, isto é, à fatalidade de se deixar cair de si mesmo, de se esvair nem que seja de uma muito ínfima cutícula, seja ela íntima ou superfícial. O belo, em suma, no único estádio em que lhe é legítimo e de propriedade pretender clamar-se assim: belo. Antes do escrúpulo e do pudor se encarregarem de lhe banir partes cruciais do altar da devoção.
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