Quotes by Charles Bukowski

"Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them; I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence."

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"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way."

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"We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."

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"The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth."

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"Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way."

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"I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions."

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"You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics."

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"The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting."

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"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."

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