Charles Bukowski Quotes

Eat with the rich, but go to the play with the poor, who are capable of joy.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everyone born into privilege should wear sack cloth and ashes. But it's something I wrestle with. I know a lot of people who live below the poverty level and have for a long time and it makes them uneasy to think they'll have to interact with people from different economic levels. Everyone has some sort of load put on them, whatever the circumstances they're born into.

I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.

Those with the money are eccentric. Those without, insane.

When asked what was the proper time for supper: If you are a rich man, whenever you please; and if you are a poor man, whenever you can.

Pride in the case of a rich man is bad, but pride in the case of a poor man is worse.

Texas has arguably the most extreme separation between the well off and everyday people in the United States.

About the only difference between the poor and the rich, is this, the poor suffer misery, while the rich have to enjoy it.

The sane are madder than we think, the mad saner.

Lunatics with money in America are never mad–just eccentric.

I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human being become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of respectability at a commensurate speed.

I think mental illness or madness can be an escape also. People don't develop a mental illness because they are in the happiest of situations, usually. One doctor observed that it was rare when people were rich to become schizophrenic. If they were poor or didn't have too much money, then it was more likely.

In Canada, we just have rich and poor, but we don't constantly remind poor people about it.

I've always felt like a lot of people's misconceptions of me have to do with how I grew up. I grew up poor, and I grew up rich.

It's a very ancient culture, British culture. You can't be seen to be too wealthy, and you certainly can't be seen to be giving away any of your wealth either because that's sort of vulgar, too. It's funny, that, because in New York, if you are wealthy, you have to be philanthropic to be successful.

I grew up in Northern Ireland, in the middle of nowhere, and when you are poor, you are really poor. And when you are rich, you are very rich. This is not a new phenomenon.

Poor people know poor people, and rich people know rich people. It is one of the few things La Rochefoucauld did not say, but then La Rochefoucauld never lived in the Bronx.

Small steps to the madhouse still get us there at last

In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?

There are two kinds of people in this world, my grandmother used to say: the Have's and the Have-not's, and she stuck to the Have's. And today, Señor Don Quixote, people are more interested in having than in knowing. An ass covered with gold makes a better impression than a horse with a packsaddle.

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.

Wherever the appearance of a conventional aristocracy exists in America, it must arise from wealth, as it cannot from birth. An aristocracy of mere wealth is vulgar everywhere. In a republic, it is vulgar in the extreme.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.

There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes.

A beggar's book outworths a noble's blood.