#Bukowski and instanity full#
#Bukowski and instanity free#

I don’t like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. What truly horrible lives they must live. The best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them. You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time all else is grandiose romanticism or politics. People are strange: they are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice. Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us.Īnything is a waste of time unless you are fucking well or creating well or getting well or looming toward a kind of phantom-love-happiness. What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.

You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. It could mean not eating for three or four days. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see. My beer drunk soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world. I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.

#Bukowski and instanity free#

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them. Poetry is what happens when nothing else can. If you get married they think you’re finished and if you are without a woman they think you’re incomplete.

Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink. How the hell could a person enjoy being awakened at 6:30AM, 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? You give your life away to a function that doesn’t interest you. The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. The tigers have found me and I do not care.Īnd yet women –– good women –– frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.īad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste. I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them. Even the most horrible human being on earth deserves to wipe his ass.īaby, I said, I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me.

Nothing is worse than to finish a good shit, then reach over and find the toilet paper container empty.

#Bukowski and instanity full#

People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water. Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside – remembering all the times you’ve felt that way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. You’ll want to brace yourself for this prose.Īn intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. If you begin to feel light-headed, take a breather. I did some digging and in my opinion, here are Bukowski’s hardest-hitting lines. 75 Charles Bukowski quotes (make sure your back is to a wall). While his writing style was less polished than Hemingway’s, it had just as much punch and arguably more tenacity.įor the unfamiliar, reading Charles Bukowski is like going for a ride on a Honey Badger –– nothing is off-limits, nothing is too scary to write about and you never know what the hell he is going to do or say next. Two, maybe three pages in, I felt like slapping myself in the face –– I couldn’t fathom how I had spent so much time on this planet having never read him. (I wrote down my favorite line from it and the other twenty-five books I’ve read so far this year, here). I picked up Bukowski for the very first time this year, beginning with arguably one of his most widely-read works, The Post Office. At the core of all good writing ( and copywriting) is the sentence.Īnd, besides Hemingway, I can’t think of a better craftsman of the single sentence than the late indie poet and novelist, Charles Bukowski.