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Charles Bukowski Quotes about Drinking

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That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you

That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.

Charles Bukowski
Drinking, Beer, Order

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.

Charles Bukowski
Suicide, Wall, Drinking

Drinking is another way of thinking, another way of living. It gives you two lives instead of one.

Charles Bukowski
Drinking, Thinking, Two

I couldn't get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat.

Charles Bukowski
Jobs, Work, Drinking
"Factotum". Book by Charles Bukowski, Ch. 31, 1975.

I still have a little whiskey left and therefore a chance.

Charles Bukowski
Drinking, Littles, Chance

I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.

Charles Bukowski
Funny, Suicide, Drinking
Charles Bukowski, “The Suicide Kid”

Women: I liked the colors of their clothing; the way they walked; the cruelty in some faces; now and then the almost pure beauty in another face, totally and enchantingly female. They had it over us: they planned much better and were better organized. While men were watching professional football or drinking beer or bowling, they, the women, were thinking about us, concentrating, studying, deciding - whether to accept us, discard us, exchange us, kill us or whether simply to leave us. In the end it hardly mattered; no matter what they did, we ended up lonely and insane.

Charles Bukowski
Football, Lonely, Drinking

stay with the beer. beer is continuous blood. a continuous lover.

Charles Bukowski
Drinking, Beer, Blood

It was sad, it was sad, it was sad. When Betty came back we didn't sing or laugh, or even argue. We sat drinking in the dark, smoking cigarettes, and when we went to sleep, I didn't put my feet on her body or she on mine like we used to. We slept without touching. We had both been robbed.

Charles Bukowski
Drinking, Sleep, Dark
Charles Bukowski (2011). “Post Office”, p.79, Random House

Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateurs drunks, the bores.

Charles Bukowski
Party, Drinking, Dirty
Charles Bukowski (1978). “Women”

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

Charles Bukowski
Drinking, Jail, Bail

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same.

Charles Bukowski
Drinking, Beer, Emotional
Charles Bukowski (2003). “Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters, 1963-1993”

Alcohol is probably one of the greatest things to arrive upon the earth - alongside of me.

Charles Bukowski
Drinking, Alcohol, Earth
Charles Bukowski (2003). “Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters, 1963-1993”

I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.

Charles Bukowski
Drinking, Hangover, Night

I think I need a drink.' 'Almost everybody does only they don't know it.

Charles Bukowski
Drinking, Thinking, Alcohol
Charles Bukowski (2007). “Women”, Ecco

I write right off the typer. I call it my "machinegun." I hit it hard, usually late at night while drinking wine and listening to classical music on the radio and smoking mangalore ganesh beedies.

Charles Bukowski
Drinking, Writing, Wine

When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.

Charles Bukowski
Drinking, World, Moments
"Factotum". Book by Charles Bukowski (Chapter 31), 1975.

I think a man can keep on drinking for centuries, he'll never die; especially wine or beer...I like drunkards, man, because drunkards, they come out of it, and they're sick and they spring back, they spring back and forth...If I hadn't been a drunkard, I probably would have committed suicide long ago.

Charles Bukowski
Suicide, Spring, Drinking

I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.

Charles Bukowski
Art, Drinking, Writing
"Factotum". Book by Charles Bukowski, Ch. 29, 1975.

Long before I became 'rich and famous' I just sat round drinking wine and staring at the walls.

Charles Bukowski
Wall, Drinking, Wine

in the cupboard sits my bottle like a dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers. I drink and cough like some idiot at a symphony, sunlight and maddened birds are everywhere, the phone rings gamboling its sound against the odds of the crooked sea; I drink deeply and evenly now, I drink to paradise and death and the lie of love.

Charles Bukowski
Prayer, Lying, Drinking

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals.

Charles Bukowski
Drinking, Ideas, Alcohol
Charles Bukowski (2007). “Women”, Ecco

When I'm drinking around people, I tend to get silly or pugnacious or wild, which can cause problems.

Charles Bukowski
Drinking, Silly, People
Charles Bukowski (2003). “Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters, 1963-1993”

I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories.

Charles Bukowski
Loneliness, Drinking, Bars
Charles Bukowski (2003). “Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters, 1963-1993”

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