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After Dinner Or Lunch Or Whatever It Was -- With My Crazy 12-hour Night I Was No Longer Sure What Was What -- I Said, "look, Baby, I'm Sorry, But Don't You Realize That This Job Is Driving Me Crazy? Look, Let's Give It Up. Let's Just Lay Around And Make Love And Take Walks And Talk A Little. Let's Go To The Zoo. Let's Look At Animals. Let's Drive Down And Look At The Ocean. It's Only 45 Minutes. Let's Play Games In The Arcades. Let's Go To The Races, The Art Museum, The Boxing Matches. Let's Have Friends. Let's Laugh. This Kind Of Life Like Everybody Else's Kind Of Life: It's Killing Us.

-Charles Bukowski

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After Dinner Or Lunch

Charles Bukowski

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After Dinner Or Lunch Or Whatever It Was -- With My Crazy 12-hour Night I Was No Longer Sure What Was What -- I Said, "look, Baby, I'm Sorry, But Don't You Realize That This Job Is Driving Me Crazy? Look, Let's Give It Up. Let's Just Lay Around And Make Love And Take Walks And Talk A Little. Let's Go To The Zoo. Let's Look At Animals. Let's Drive Down And Look At The Ocean. It's Only 45 Minutes. Let's Play Games In The Arcades. Let's Go To The Races, The Art Museum, The Boxing Matches. Let's Have Friends. Let's Laugh. This Kind Of Life Like Everybody Else's Kind Of Life: It's Killing Us.

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Reinventing Yourself

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Well, Death Says, As He Walks By, I'm Going To Get You Anyhow No Matter What You've Been: Writer, Cab-driver, Pimp, Butcher, Sky-diver, I'm Going To Get You

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No Matter How Little A Man Has He Will Find That He Will Always Settle For Less.

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Beware The Average Man The Average Woman Beware Their Love, Their Love Is Average Seeks Average But There Is Genius In Their Hatred There Is Enough Genius In Their Hatred To Kill You To Kill Anybody Not Wanting Solitude Not Understanding Solitude They Will Attempt To Destroy Anything That Differs From Their Own Not Being Able To Create Art They Will Not Understand Art They Will Consider Their Failure As Creators Only As A Failure Of The World

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Bad Poetry Is Caused By People Who Sit Down And Think, Now I Am Going To Write A Poem.

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What's Wrong With Assholes, Baby?

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The Courage It Took To Get Out Of Bed Each Morning To Face The Same Things Over And Over Was Enormous.

Love Be Damned Now As Love Was Damned When It First Arrived.

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You Don't Go On "probably" When Love And Guns Are In Hand.

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Success Is Always Dangerous. It Can Make An Asshole Out Of Anybody.

There Was Nothing Glorious About The Life Of A Drinker Or The Life Of A Writer.

There's No Way I Can Stop Writing, It's A Form Of Insanity.

Sometimes I Feel As If We Are All Trapped In A Movie. We Know Our Lines, Where To Walk, How To Act, Only There Is No Camera. Yet, We Can't Break Out Of The Movie. And It's A Bad One.

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Many A Good Man Has Been Put Under The Bridge By A Woman.

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And The Color In My Eyes Has Gone Back Into The Sea.

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They Thought I Had Guts They Were Wrong I Was Only Frightened Of More Important Things

Where Some God Pissed A Rain Of Reason To Make Things Grow Only To Die.

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There Was Something About That City, Though It Didn't Let Me Feel Guilty That I Had No Feeling For The Things So Many Others Needed. It Let Me Alone.

Let It Die. Let There Be A New Beginning. It’s Awful. Goodnight.

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The Park Grass Looked Greener, The Park Benches Looked Better And The Flowers Were Trying Harder.

It Doesn't Matter If Prince Charles Falls Off His Horse Or That The Hummingbird Is So Seldom Seen Or That We Are Too Senseless To Go Insane. Coffee. Give Us More Of That Nothing Coffee.

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But Then If You Lied To A Man About His Talent Just Because He Was Sitting Across From You, That Was The Most Unforgivable Lie Of Them All, Because That Was Telling Him To Go On, To Continue Which Was The Worst Way For A Man Without Real Talent To Waste His Life, Finally. But Many People Did Just That, Friends And Relatives Mostly.

When You Drank The World Was Still Out There, But For The Moment It Didn’t Have You By The Throat.

I Wasn’t Going Anywhere And Neither Was The Rest Of The World. We Were All Just Hanging Around Waiting To Die And Meanwhile Doing Little Things To Fill The Space. Some Of Use Weren’t Even Doing Little Things. We Were Vegetables.

It's 4:30 In The Morning, It's Always 4:30 In The Morning.

The Less I Needed, The Better I Felt.

Slavery Was Never Abolished, It Was Only Extended To Include All The Colors.

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I Guess We Often Get The Deep Blues, Both Of Us, And Wonder What It All Means- The People, The Buildings, The Day By Day Things, The Waste Of Time, Of Ourselves.

I Was So Thin I Could Slice Bread With My Shoulderblades, Only I Seldom Had Bread.

The Worst Thing For A Writer Is To Know Another Writer, And Worse Than That, To Know A Number Of Other Writers. Like Flies On The Same Turd.

I Was Fighting A Small Fight Of My Own Which Wasn't Leading Anywhere-but Like A Man With A Bent Spoon Trying To Dig Through A Cement Wall I Knew That A Small Fight Was Better Than Quitting: It Kept The Heart Alive.

Knowledge Without Follow-through Is Worse Than No Knowledge.

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.

Most People Are Not Ready For Death, Theirs Or Anybody Elses.

Never Envy A Man His Lady. Behind It All Lays A Living Hell.

They Say That Nothing Is Wasted: Either That Or It Al Is

To Create Art Means To Be Crazy Alone Forever.

I Am A Series Of Small Victories And Large Defeats And I Am As Amazed As Any Other That I Have Gotten From There To Here.

Small Victories

Dying In A A War Never Stopped Wars From Happening.

Never Trust A Man In A Jumpsuit

Never Trust A Man

When You Leave Your Typewriter You Leave Your Machine Gun And The Rats Come Pouring Through.

It Didn't Pay To Trust Another Human Being. Humans Didn't Have It, Whatever It Took.

Bad Writing's Like Bad Women: There's Just Not Much You Can Do About It

Understand Me. I’m Not Like An Ordinary World. I Have My Madness, I Live In Another Dimension And I Do Not Have Time For Things That Have No Soul.

I Just Want A Hot Cup Of Coffee,black,and I Don’t Want To Hear About Your Troubles.

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I Have Gotten So Used To Melancholia That I Greet It Like An Old Friend.

Whiskey Makes The Heart Beat Faster But It Sure Doesn't Help The Mind And Isn't It Funny How You Can Ache Just From The Deadly Drone Of Existence?

The Crazy Ones Only Laugh When There Is No Reason To Laugh.

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It Was Like A Church In There As Only The Truly Lost Sit In Bars On Tuesday Mornings At 8:00 A.m.

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When I Was A Boy I Used To Dream Of Becoming The Village Idiot. I Used To Lie In Bed And Imagine Myself The Happy Idiot Able To Get Food Easily ...and Easy Sympathy, A Planned Confusion Of Not Too Much Love Or Effort. Some Would Claim That I Have Succeeded.

We Had Such Tremendous Fun And Much Agony Together For Some Years

Pull A String, A Puppet Moves ... Each Man Must Realize That It Can All Disappear Very Quickly: The Cat, The Woman, The Job, The Front Tire, The Bed, The Walls, The Room; All Our Necessities Including Love, Rest On Foundations Of Sand - And Any Given Cause, No Matter How Unrelated: The Death Of A Boy In Hong Kong Or A Blizzard In Omaha ... Can Serve As Your Undoing. All Your Chinaware Crashing To The Kitchen Floor, Your Girl Will Enter And You'll Be Standing, Drunk, In The Center Of It And She'll Ask: My God, What's The Matter? And You'll Answer: I Don't Know, I Don't Know.

The Public Takes From A Writer, Or A Writing, What It Needs And Lets The Remainder Go. But What They Take Is Usually What They Need Least And What They Let Go Is What They Need Most.

Erections, Ejaculations,exhibitions And General Tales Of Ordinary Madness.

Some Nights I Knew That If I Slept I Would Die.

The Years Have Gone By Quickly. Death Sits In The Seat Next To Me. We Make A Lovely Couple.

Wherever The Crowd Goes Run In The Other Direction. They're Always Wrong.

My Greatest Problem Was Stamps, Envelopes, Paper And Wine, With The World On The Edge Of World War Ii.

When The Phone Rings I Too Would Like To Hear Words That Might Ease Some Of This.

Maybe When I Get In The Grave, Things Will Be Beautiful.

I Would Be Married, But I'd Have No Wife, I Would Be Married To A Single Life.

When I Was Young I Was Depressed All The Time. But Suicide No Longer Seemed A Possibility In My Life. At My Age There Was Very Little Left To Kill. It Was Good To Be Old, No Matter What They Said. It Was Reasonable That A Man Had To Be At Least 50 Years Old Before He Could Write With Anything Like Clarity.

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