Home

Notes Of A Dirty Old Man Quotes

Notes Of A Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski

Notes Of A Dirty Old Man Quotes
"You give up toast and end up eating the cat."
"Absolute freedom to write anything you please."
"If they hadn’t airbrushed the cock and balls off the Christ child, you wouldn’t be reading this."
"The people will always betray you. Never trust the people."
"To have great audiences we need great poets."
"We are all going to be smashed, very quickly into broken children’s toys."
"He wouldn’t slash his shoelaces. What a sickening little snip."
"Each drunken and starvation moment contained some type of easy meaning for me."
"That’s why friendship means: sharing the prejudice of experience."
"The pain is now almost entirely total. When it gets entirely total I will not be able to last any longer."
"The female procreates with the fake — then doesn’t this destroy a law of Nature? — that the strong mate with the strong?"
"Society’s laws and nature’s laws are different. We have an _un_natural society."
"All men are graded according to what they got caught at doing."
"The reason the average person is at the racetrack is that they are driven screwy by the turn of the bolt, the foreman’s insane face, the landlord’s hand, the lover’s dead sex."
"little maiden," he said, "may at least some of your hours be more gentle than mine."
"man, man, it’s a funny world," he said. "we’ve got everything but we can’t have it."
"the Chicago boys sure made a mistake busting the big press boys on the head — that knock on the head might get them to thinking."
"if you are going to pay through the nose get something better than a 36 month warranty."
"I am ashamed to be a member of the human race but I don’t want to add any more to that shame, I want to scrape a little of it off."
"it’s tough times, brothers, and I don’t know quite what to tell you."
"the religious con boys are moving in with the revolutionary con boys and you can’t tell asshole from pussy, brothers."
"realize this, and you have a beginning. listen carefully, and you have a beginning. swallow it all, and you’re dead."
"a writer who has to go INTO the streets is a writer who does not know the streets."
"when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through."
"we have wasted history like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men’s crapper of the local bar."
"death was really boredom, death was really boredom, and even the tigers and ants would never know how."
"it was all right and it didn’t matter about blowing the blues. Satchmo, go home. Shostakovitch, in your Fifth, forget it."
"I think that it was in 1954 that I last tried suicide."
"There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff’s edge."
"Suicide seems incomprehensible unless you yourself are thinking about it."
"Love is a way with some meaning; sex is meaning enough."
"You’ve got your books of philosophy, your priest, your preacher, your scientist, so don’t ask me."
"I went to sleep. it would have worked too, only inhaling the gas gave me such a headache that the headache awakened me."
"Maybe we find it when we die. Maybe we don’t."
"I'm climbing! Don't fall! If you fall from there you're finished!"
"Women are basically stupid animals but they concentrate so much and entirely upon the male that they often defeat him while he is thinking of other things."
"Everything is horrible really, and I add to it."
"It's not dying that's bad, it's being lost that's bad."
"The public takes from a writer, or a writing, what it needs and lets the remainder go."
"Sex is interesting but not totally important."
"You see these same beauty contest winners years later, grown old, in supermarkets; they are fussy, insane, bitter, demeaned."
"It all begins and ends with the mailbox, and when they find a way to remove mailboxes, much of our suffering will end."
"I have a vast and curved penis, like a sickle, and many a gutted pussy has gasped come upon my callous and roach-smeared rug."
"When Love becomes a command, Hatred can become a pleasure."
"Beautiful thoughts, and beautiful women never last."
"You can cage a tiger but you’re never sure he’s broken. Men are easier."
"If you want to know where God is, ask a drunk."
"No pain means the end of feeling; each of our joys is a bargain with the devil."
"The difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable."
"I’d rather hear about a live American bum than a dead Greek God."
"Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot."
"A brave man lacks imagination. Cowardice is usually caused by lack of proper diet."
"Sexual intercourse is kicking death in the ass while singing."
"When men rule governments, men won’t need governments; until then we are screwed."
"An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way."
"Every time I go to a funeral I feel as if I had eaten puffed wheat germ."
"Dripping faucets, farts of passion, flat tires — are all sadder than death."
"If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence."
"Hospitals are where they attempt to kill you without explaining why. The cold and measured cruelty of the American Hospital is not caused by doctors who are overworked or who have gotten used to, and bored with death. it is caused by doctors WHO ARE PAID TOO MUCH FOR DOING TOO LITTLE and who are admired by the ignorant, as witchmen with cure, when most of the time they don’t know their own arse-hairs from celery shreds."
"Before a metropolitan daily exposes an evil, it takes its own pulse."
"forget it, but let’s put it this way — I can’t do that sort of thing, set up a pigeon, because essentially I’m a nice guy, I’m not like that."
"you’re no nice guy. you’re the meanest son of a bitch I ever met. that’s why I like you."
"baby," said Lou, "I love you, oh I love you so much just let me go to bed with you one time and I’ll cut off both of my arms, I swear it!"
"you were pissing. I saw you pissing in the moonlight in the center of that vacant lot."
"sometimes driving down Western I would check the club billboard. there it was, Renie Fox. only she wasn’t headlined."
"at rare times I’m an artist; at most other times I’m nothing."
"you are my manipulator; but there is nothing you can do to me that cannot be done."
"of course, especially if you don’t know them too well."
"you mean to say that you can LOVE a piece of buttered toast?"