Tuesday, January 25, 2011

HOLD.

Sorry to the 3 followers but I'm not going to be able to post for a bit; hopefully be back soon.

Monday, January 24, 2011

On Johnny Cash [live at Folsom] & Bob Hope . . . 

"I feel like it's something like tossing meatless bones instead of biscuits to the hungered and trapped. I don't feel a damn thing holy or brave about it. There's only one thing to do for men in jail: let 'em out, there's only one thing to do for men at war: stop the war."

Ibid.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

"not wanting to wade in shit forever, and although shit was a good teacher there were only so many lessons and then it could drown you and kill you forever."

From the short story "I Shot A Man In Reno."

Saturday, January 22, 2011

"Children's games, that's all people play: children's games - they go from the cunt to the grave without ever being touched by the horror of life."

From the short story "Purple As An Iris."

Friday, January 21, 2011

"Anybody can expose their genitals at night. At two p.m. in the afternoon it took some balls."

From the short story "Nut Ward Just East of Hollywood."

Thursday, January 20, 2011

"I began hoping the plane would lose a wing and then I'd really get to see what the faces of the stewardesses looked like." 

Ibid.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

"People in bars were like people in 5 and dime stores: they were killing time and everything else."

From the short story "Would You Suggest Writing as a Career?"

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

"LIFE. the punk just talked about it, didn't bother to live it."

From the short story "Cunt and Kant and a Happy Home."

Monday, January 17, 2011

"The only time a man needed a lot of women was when none of them were any good."

From "Women." 

Sunday, January 16, 2011

"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."

Another gem from the novel, "Women." 

Saturday, January 15, 2011

"I've got to get back to the typewriter, I thought. Art takes discipline. Any asshole can chase a skirt."

From the novel, "Women." 

Friday, January 14, 2011

"the freeway is a circus of cheap and petty emotions, it's humanity on the move, most of them coming from some place they hated and going to another they hate just as much or more. the freeways are a lesson in what we have become and most of the crashes and deaths are the collision of incomplete beings, of pitiful and demented lives. when I drive the freeways I see the soul of humanity of my city and it's ugly, ugly, ugly: the living have choked the heart away."

From the poem "drive through hell." Read the whole poem here.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

"each man's hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind my ruined face." 

From the poem "let's make a deal."

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

"you know, defeat can strengthen just as victory can weaken, and if you have the proper luck and the holy endurance the gods just might deliver the proper admixture"

From the poem "the freeway life." 

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

"the difference between a movie critic and the average movie-goer? Answer: the critic didn't have to pay."

Another good one from Hollywood.

Monday, January 10, 2011

"what made the whole thing smell was that many of the rich and the famous were actually dumb cunts and bastards. They had simply fallen into a big pay-off somewhere. Or they were enriched by the stupidity of the general public. They usually were talentless, eyeless, soulless, they were walking pieces of dung, but to the public they were god-like, beautiful, and revered. Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste."

From Hollywood [his second to last novel] that documented his experiences with the making of Barfly the movie he wrote starring Mickey Rourke & Faye Dunaway. Barfly introduced me to Bukowski; I highly recommend it! "Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste." - I think the colossal success of Jersey Shore affirms this sentiment!

Sunday, January 9, 2011

"Human relationships didn't work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death--in a cesspool. The most one could hope for in a human relationship, I decided, was two and one-half years."

From Women.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

"yet there bad been warmth, it had not been without feeling, dead meat coupled with dead meat. I detested that type of swinging, the Los Angeles, Hollywood, Bel Air, Malibu, Laguna Beach kind of sex. Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part--a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each other. People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no gamble or humor in their game--it was corpse fucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience down through the centuries. Some morals tended to keep people slaves in factories, in churches and true to the State. Other morals simply made good sense. It was like a garden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. You had to know which to pick and eat, which to leave alone." 

One of my personal favorites from Women.

Friday, January 7, 2011

"The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn't interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative."

From Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews & Encounters 1963-1993, 2003

Thursday, January 6, 2011

"The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape." 

From Ham on Rye

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

"failure was nothing but a trick to keep us going, and fame and love a trick to dull our bleeding. and as fire becomes ash and steel becomes rust, we become wise and then not so wise." 

From the poem "A Trick to Dull Our Bleeding" appearing in The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946-1966.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

"I was still naked. I looked down at my penis: you dirty son-of-a-bitch! Do you know all the heartache you cause with your dumb hunger?"

Another comedic gem from Women.

Monday, January 3, 2011

"And yet women--good women--frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep."

From Women [his third novel].

Sunday, January 2, 2011

"The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding otu with a tommy-gun."

From Ham on Rye [his fourth novel].

Saturday, January 1, 2011

"return the next morning to punch in knowing we were suckers making the rich richer . . .we were some gang in that death ballet, we were magnificent we gave them better than they asked, yet, we gave them nothing."

From the poem, "SPARKS" appearing in the 1983 New Year's Greeting From Black Sparrow Press.