Charles Bukowski Quotes

It's the relationship I have with the world: always trying to escape from reality. I'm a daydreamer; I don't feel in harmony with my epoch or the societies I live in.

Surreal can be exciting and good, and it can be like living inside an alien landscape, and it can be completely interesting, or you can be alienated from your own life - inside your own life, it doesn't feel familiar any more.

I probably still haven’t completely adapted to the world. I don’t know, I feel like this isn’t the real world. The people, the scene: they just don’t seem real to me.

For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.

'The difficulty with this conversation,' said Arthur after a sort of pondering look had crawled slowly across his face like a mountaineer negotiating a tricky outcrop, 'is that it's very different from most of the ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.'

Compared with games, reality is disconnected.

The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it.

I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged.

I live in Hollywood, but you can't make me love Hollywood. I'll never love Hollywood.

We live in a strange bubble.

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

Reality is a dirty word for me, I know it isn't for most people, but I am not interested. There's too much of it about.

We've always been a bit out of touch with reality.

I came to Washington where I knew I would be farther away from America than I could be on some foreign shore.

Hanging out with the Trees is like hanging out with your family, and I hardly ever see my family.

As a session player for so many years, I have found myself in rooms looking around going, 'Is this for real?'

I deal out of a reality that isn't real. I'm sorry. I don't know what that means. I don't really know what I do.

There's an uncanniness to living in Los Angeles, from the way you move through the city to the moments of feeling familiarity or deja vu, like you've been somewhere or you know something when you really don't.

I opened the door and blinked out into the bright hall. I had the impression it wasn't night and it wasn't day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.

Then they grow away from the earth then they grow away from the sun then they grow away from the plants and the animals. They see no life. When they look they see only objects. The world is a dead thing for them the trees and the rivers are not alive. the mountains and stones are not alive. The deer and bear are objects. They see no life. They fear. They fear the world. They destroy what they fear. They fear themselves.

In another place, in another time, she would have felt the majesty of the beauty around her, but as she stood on the beach, she realized that she didn't feel anything at all. In a way, she felt as if she weren't really here, as if the whole thing was nothing but a dream.

It was so easy to disown what you couldn't recognize, to keep yourself apart from things that were foreign and unsettling. The only person you can be sure to control, always, is yourself. Which is a lot to be sure of, but at the same time, not enough.

Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.

He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.