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Charles Bukowski adored cats, and like everything he appreciated, they found a way into his work. They pop up in his novels, short stories, essays, and poems, often serving as a metaphor for the way he wished to live: Unconcerned yet wise and bold.
His publisher put out a collection of his writings on cats, under the title On Cats, in 2017.
Bukowski Quotes On Cats
“In my next life I want to be a cat. To sleep 20 hours a day and wait to be fed. To sit around licking my ass. Humans are too miserable and angry and single-minded.”
~ Charles Bukowski
“And a cat never knows fear—finally—he only winds up into the spring of the sea and the rock, and even in a death-fight he does not think of anything except the majesty of darkness.”
~ Charles Bukowski
“If you’re feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you’ll feel better, because they know that everything is, just as it is. There’s nothing to get excited about. They just know. They’re saviors. The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you’ll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live for ever.”
~ Charles Bukowski
"The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you’ll live ten times longer than if you have ten. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever." ~ Charles Bukowski#NationalCatDay #Cats pic.twitter.com/G0k9FOHdbj
— Charles Bukowski Quotes (@bukowskiquoteus) October 29, 2019
“and now sometimes I’m interviewed, they want to hear
about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-
eyed
shot runover de-tailed cat before them and I say, ‘look,
look
at this!’
but they don’t understand, they say something like, ‘you
say you’ve been influenced by Celine . . .’
‘no,’ I hold the cat up before them, ‘by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this! . . .'”
~ Charles Bukowski
“yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway
with the mockingbird alive in its mouth,
wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping,
feathers parted like a woman’s legs in sex,
and the bird was no longer mocking,
it was asking, it was praying
but the cat
striding down through centuries
would not listen.”
~ Charles Bukowski
“they complain but never
worry.
they walk with a surprising dignity.
they sleep with a direct simplicity that
humans just can’t
understand…
when I am feeling low all I have to do is watch my cats and my courage returns.
I study these creatures.
they are my teachers.”
~ Charles Bukowski
“A cat walks by and shakes Shakespeare
off his back.
I don’t want to draw
like Mondrian,
I want to draw like a sparrow eaten by a cat.”
~ Charles Bukowski
“I’ve got these two kittens who are rapidly growing into
cats and
we sleep on the same bed at night–the problem being that
they are early risers:
I am often awakened by claws running across my
face.
these,
all they do is run, eat, sleep, shit and
fight
but at moments they are still and they look
at me
with eyes
far more beautiful than any human eyes I have ever
seen.
they are good guys…
I expect any number of cat poems from them
of which this is the
first.
“my god,” they will say, “all Chinaski writes about
are cats!”
“my god,” they used to say, “all Chinaski writes about
are whores!”
the complainers will complain and keep buying my
books: they just love the way I irritate
them.”
~ Charles Bukowski, from “a nature poem for you”
“as I am sitting here
in front of this machine
my cat Ting
sits behind me
on the back of the
chair.
now
as I type this
he steps upon an open
drawer
and out across the
desk.
now his nose is over this
paper and he watches me
type
then he leaves off
goes over and sticks his
nose into a coffee
cup.
now he’s back
his head across this
piece of paper
he sticks his paw down
into the ribbon
I hit the key and he leaps
off.
now he just sits and
watches me
type.
I’ve moved my wine glass
and bottle
to the other side of the
machine.
the radio plays bad piano
music.
Ting just sits and looks
at this typer.
do you think he wants to
be a
writer?
or was he one
in the past?”
~ Charles Bukowski, from “My Cat, The Writer”
“my cat shit in my archives
he climbed into my Golden State Sunkist
orange box
and he shit on my poems
my original poems
saved for the university archives.
that one-eared fat black critic
he signed me off.”
~ Charles Bukowski, “a reader”
“warm light alone tonight in this house, alone with 6 cats who tell me without effort all that there is to know.”
~ Charles Bukowski
