Charles Bukowski

Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style. ”

To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art. ”

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong. ”

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there. ”

It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well. ”

My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing. ”