News never changes much. It’s just the same things happening to different people. I would rather experience things happening to me than read about them happening to others. I am my own newspaper and my own radio. I honestly don’t believe that man was meant to know everything going on in the world, all at the same time. A man turns on the TV and all those commentators bombard him with the local, the national and the international news. The newspapers do the same thing, and the poor guy with all the immediate problems of his own life is burdened with those of the whole world.
One man’s wilderness
This country makes a man younger than his birthdays.
One man’s wilderness
There’s no sleeping pill like a good day’s work.
One man’s wilderness
The mountains are wearing new hats this morning.
One man’s wilderness
It seems a shame for eyes to be shut when such things are going on, especially in this big country.
One man’s wilderness
I thought of the man at his desk staring down from a city window at the ant colony streets below, the man toiling beside the thudding and rumbling of machinery, the man commuting to his job the same way at the same time each morning, staring at but not seeing the poles and the wires and the dirty buildings flashing past. Perhaps each man had his moment during the day when his vision came, a vision not unlike the one before me.
One man’s wilderness
Don’t Forget to Remember
We read and read and read, and we forget and forget and forget. So why do we bother?
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it.
He got what he wanted but lost what he had.
The packing lists were never wrong probably because the guy at the other end was too frightened for his job to be careless. Usually he is on the seventh of thirty-six payments for his new car, his wife is taking a ceramics class on Monday night, the interest on his mortgage is eating him alive, and each one of his five kids drinks a quart of milk a day.
Charles Bukowski
How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
Charles Bukowski
I’ve given you my time. It’s all I’ve got to give—it’s all any man has. And for a pitiful buck and a quarter an hour.
Charles Bukowski
A man grows most tired when standing still.
Sometimes you have to travel a long way to find what is near.
