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The Charles Bukowski book Notes of a Dirty Old Man was published by Essex House in 1969, and later picked up by City Lights Publishing Company. It is made up of a selection of writings from his Open City column of the same name, which was an alternative newspaper published in Los Angeles, from 1967 to 1969.

Below are some of the best quotes from the book, in order of appearance:

“every man is afraid of being a queer. I get a little tired of it. maybe we should all become queers and relax.”

“I get very tired of the precious intellects who must speak diamonds every time they open their mouths. ”

“I remember a statement by Whitman:

‘to have great poets we need great audiences.’ well, I always figure a Whitman a greater poet than I, if that matters, only this time I think he got the thing backwards. it should read:

‘to have great audiences we need great poets.’

“once in a rare lifetime have you ever been in a room full of people who only helped when you looked at them, listened to them. this was one of those magic times. I knew it.”

“cities are built to kill people.”

“I picked them good — about 90 percent — but I had to see them first. I always chose the guy who moved around the least, who looked like he didn’t want to fight, and if one guy made the Sign of the Cross before the bell and the other guy didn’t you had a winner — you took the guy who didn’t. but it usually worked together: the guy who did all the shadow boxing and dancing around usually was the one who gave the Sign of the Cross and got his ass whipped.”

“but I’ve got an old saying (I make up old sayings as I walk around in rags) that knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge at all. because if you’re guessing and it doesn’t work you can just say, shit, the gods are against me. but if you know and don’t do, you’ve got attics and dark halls in your mind to walk up and down in and wonder about.”

“the reason the average person is at the track 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; taxation, cancer, the blues; clothes that fall apart on a 3rd wearing, water that tastes like piss, doctors that run assembly-line and indecent offices, hospitals without heart, politicians with skulls filled with pus.”

Related: Charles Bukowski Quotes on Horse Racing

“we are hooked, slapped and chopped silly; so silly that some of us finally love tormentors because they are there to torment us along logical lines of torture. this seems so reasonable, since there isn’t anything else showing.”

“this guy in army fatigues came up to me and said, ‘now that it happened to Kennedy you’ll have something to write about.’ he claims to be a writer, why doesn’t he write about it? I’ve always got to pick up their messy balls and put them into a little literary sack for them. I think we’ve got enough experts on the case now — that’s what this decade is: the Decade of the Experts and the Decade of the Assassins. and neither one of them worth crystallized dog turds.”

“I’m also told by the God-fearing that I have ‘sinned’ because I was born a human being and once upon a time human beings did something to one Jesus Christ. I neither killed Christ or Kennedy.”

“as anybody knows the sportswriters are the worst of the worst when it comes to writing and especially when it comes to thinking.”

“and now we have the headshrinkers, the thinkers, the panels, the appointed presidential boards trying to figure out what’s wrong with us. who’s mad, who’s glad, who’s sad, who’s right, who’s wrong. lock up the mad, when fifty-nine out of sixty men you meet on the street are cuckoo with industrial neuroses and wives and strives and no time to loosen up and find out where they are or why, and when money which has kept them boosted and blinded for so fucking long, when that’s no good no longer, then what we gonna do? come, baby, the assassins have been with us a long time. only it ain’t been a blast, just a man with a face like sawdust and eyes like shitstains, so many men like that and women too. millions of them…

“and those little headshrinkers, flashing their magic aces, conning us with words, saying this is so because your mother had a clubfoot and your father drank and a chicken shitted in your mouth when you were three years old and therefore you are a homosexual or a punch press operator. everything but the truth: simply that some men feel bad because life is bad for them the way and it is and that it could easily be made better. but, no, the headshrinkers with their mechanistic baubles that will some day be proven completely false, they will continue to tell us that we are all mad and they will be well paid to do so…

“what they won’t tell us is that our madmen, our assassins do spring from our present mode of life, our good old All-American way of living and dying. Christ, that we are all not outwardly raving, that’s the miracle!”

“that’s what friendship means: sharing the prejudice of experience.”

“we’ve got everything but we can’t have it.”

“courts are places where the ending is written first and all that precedes is simply vaudeville.”

“some men hope for revolution, but when you revolt and set up your new government you find your new government is still the same old Papa, he has only put on a cardboard mask.”

“there is only one place to write and that is ALONE at a typewriter…WHEN YOU LEAVE YOUR TYPEWRITER YOU LEAVE YOUR MACHINE GUN AND THE RATS COME POURING THROUGH. when Camus began giving speeches before the academies his writing died. Camus did not start as a speechmaker, he started as a writer; it was not an automobile accident that killed him.”

More Notes of a Dirty Old Man Quotes on Page 2 >

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