People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water. Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside – remembering all the times you’ve felt that way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. You’ll want to brace yourself for this prose.Īn intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way.

If you begin to feel light-headed, take a breather. I did some digging and in my opinion, here are Bukowski’s hardest-hitting lines. 75 Charles Bukowski quotes (make sure your back is to a wall). While his writing style was less polished than Hemingway’s, it had just as much punch and arguably more tenacity.įor the unfamiliar, reading Charles Bukowski is like going for a ride on a Honey Badger –– nothing is off-limits, nothing is too scary to write about and you never know what the hell he is going to do or say next. Two, maybe three pages in, I felt like slapping myself in the face –– I couldn’t fathom how I had spent so much time on this planet having never read him.

(I wrote down my favorite line from it and the other twenty-five books I’ve read so far this year, here). I picked up Bukowski for the very first time this year, beginning with arguably one of his most widely-read works, The Post Office. At the core of all good writing ( and copywriting) is the sentence.Īnd, besides Hemingway, I can’t think of a better craftsman of the single sentence than the late indie poet and novelist, Charles Bukowski.

Post office bukovski