Charles Bukowski Quotes

I know exactly what it's like to not have a penny. I know exactly what it's like trying to get a job. I know exactly what it's like having bloody one tin of Ambrosia left in the cupboard. But I know I can survive.

We had no electricity, no gas. Food was probably our greatest entertainment - the most fun thing that we could do was food.

It's not hard to tell we was poor - when you saw the toilet paper dryin' on the clothesline.

I used to live off of nothing.

I grew up with very little. I remember vividly using buckets of water to shower.

My mom Marina and I were poor and hungry. We could sometimes not afford to eat - seriously. We lived together in a small town, called Berdyansk, in Ukraine. I was an only child. I don't think we would have survived if there had been more kids.

We used to wash our hair in buckets and survive on toasted sandwiches, chocolates and soup.

We had very few things. I had a couple pairs of jeans, a couple shirts. And same with my mom and sister. I think my sister had, like, two toys. We were living off of instant noodles.

We came from nothing really. One house. Ten people. Even days the lights was off. The worst days was not eating. Surviving off rice and toast.

I was living on a loaf of bread a week.

I grew up in Plaza East public housing in the Western Addition, five of us living on $900 per month. 'Recycling' meant drinking out of old mayonnaise jars.

I come from a family where some nights you don't know where food's going to come from. There's nights where you're going to have go to bed hungry.

Yeah, I came over to Cambridge with 500 quid in my pocket and I had to borrow a waistcoat off another Australian player. I couldn't afford to buy one.

We were so poor my daddy unplugged the clocks when we went to bed.

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

I was happy, I wasn't beaten, and I lacked nothing. But it wasn't what people expect - it was very much sort of pinching and scraping. I don't know how my mother did it.

I think I probably have the philosophy of a poor man. You know, like maybe I'd steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes.

We didn't really feel poor. You don't know that as a kid, but we really didn't have any cash. When machinery broke down, we didn't have money for parts, so we did our best to fix it.

In my heart, I'm just a kid from the council houses. I can remember the old cottage and my dad coming round with the tin bath. I'm not a rich man.

Things were so bad we ate rabbits that neighbours had run over and gave to us because they knew we were broke.

I traveled with my mother, Lela, and there was never enough money. I always had to roll down my silk stockings and carry a doll when we bought train tickets so I could go half-fare. If we had $3, we always figured how to tip for the trunks and still eat.

Sometimes we used to eat once a day... chicken backs. You could buy four chicken backs for a quarter.

The war years were the most difficult time of my life. There was real famine in Moscow. The water froze inside the houses. There was no heat.

There was a point when I almost gave up. I couldn't feed myself. I couldn't feed my pets.

It was a real hand-to-mouth existence in those early days - I'd have whatever dry cereal there was in the house for breakfast, 30 cents to spend on lunch and a hot dog for dinner. I did that for years. So there was definitely a hunger in me, of various kinds, to succeed.