Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

"The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even during the day with covers pulled up to my chin. It was good in there, nothing ever occurred in there, no people, nothing."

"I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them."

"If you can hit a guy once, you can hit him twice."

"First paycheck I get, I thought, I'm going to get myself a room near the downtown L. A. Public Library."

"Never bring a lot of money to where a poor man lives. He can only lose what little he has. On the other hand it is mathematically possible that he might win whatever you bring with you. What you must do, with money and the poor, is never let them get too close to one another."

"I was like a turd that drew flies instead of like a flower that butterflies and bees desired. I wanted to live alone,I felt best being alone, cleaner,,,"

"since some people had told me that I was ugly, I always preferred shade to the sun, darkness to light"

"Anything, anything to stop drowning in this dull, trivial and cowardly existence."

"I didn't know if I was unhappy. I felt too miserable to be unhappy."

"I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely."

"When I get down to my last dime I'll just walk over to skid row."There are some real weirdos down there."They're everywhere."

"What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability."

"I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get."

"There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D. H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D. H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G. B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless."

"To think, somebody had suicided for that."

"I'd decided the campus was just a place to hide. There were some campus freaks who stayed on forever. The whole college scene was soft. They never told you what to expect out there in the real world. They just crammed you with theory and never told you how hard the pavements were. A college education could destroy an individual for life. Books could make you soft. When you put them down, and really went out there, then you needed to know what they never told you."

"It was a joy! Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you."

"I had also read somewhere that if a man didn't truly believe or understand what he was espousing, somehow he could do a more convincing job"

"You could sit in there all day drinking coffee and they never asked you to leave no matter how bad you looked. They just asked the bums not to bring their wine and drink it there. Places like that gave you hope when there wasn´t much hope."

"All right, God, say that You are really there. You have put me in this fix. You want to test me. Suppose I test You? Suppose I say that You are not there? You've given me a supreme test with my parents and with these boils. I think that I have passed Your test. I am tougher than You. If You will come down here right now, I will spit into Your face, if You have a face. And do You shit? The priest never answered that question. He told us not to doubt. Doubt what? I think that You have been picking on me too much so I am asking You to come down here so I can put You to the test! I waited. Nothing. I waited for God. I waited and waited. I believe I slept."