More Notes of a Dirty Old Man Charles Bukowski Quotes

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More Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski’s name might be everywhere in the 21st century, getting namechecked in everything from ads selling whiskey to presidential candidates (now president), in the 1960s he was an unknown postal employee publishing poems in obscure littles.

By the late ’60s, it’s possible you’d have heard of him, but likely only if you lived in the Los Angeles area and were of a particular bent. In 1967 Bukowski began writing his “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” column for John Bryan’s Open City, an alternative newspaper. With no dictum as to what or how to write, he was given free reign to deliver his pontifications on life, politics, hippies, writers, writing, beer shits, horses, women, and whatever else happened to tickle his scrotum that week. And he’d get $10 a week for his efforts, or just over $90 in 2023 money. He would take that same column to NOLA Express and the Los Angeles Free Press.

As “More Notes of a Dirty Old Man” editor David Stephen Calonne writes in the book’s afterword, the column’s deadline “opened the creative floodgates,” and allowing him the opportunity to experiment with mining his life, both past and present, for material, much of which would reappear in his novels. You can see that here, and at times it’s not in as compelling a form but it’s still interesting to see an early stage version of a story you’ve come to love. It’s like hearing a favorite band’s demo tapes. Sure, it’s not for the casual fan, but these collections are for the more diehards anyway, and the publisher knows it.

Which is not to say there’s nothing new here. This is a great collection not only because it is raw, unfiltered, lively Bukowski-without the Martinizing-but also because it really does deliver on the promise of the “The Uncollected Columns” subtitle.

A collection of these columns, also titled “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” was first published in 1969 by Essex House, and later republished by City Lights. This collection is that same publisher’s follow up, “More Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” was published in 2011 and is edited by Calonne, who has also done solid work with the posthumous Bukowski collections, “Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook,” “Charles Bukowski: Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters 1963-1993,” “The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way,” and “The Bell Tolls for No One.”

Below is a collection of some of the best quotes from “More Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” to give you a small idea of some of the brilliance to be found in the collection. This is by no means a replacement for reading the actual work, so make sure you grab a copy.

Best “More Notes of a Dirty Old Man” Quotes

Being locked into a large building where 4,000 people work at dull and menial tasks has its compensations but it has disadvantages too-for instance, you can never be sure who is going to be assigned to work next to you. A bad soul makes for a worse night. Enough bad souls can kill you.
“Are you for LSD?”
“I don’t use it.”
“Don’t you think it’s a passing fad?”
“Nothing that is against the law ever ceases to exist.”
“Experience can dull. With most men experience is a series of mistakes; the more experience you have the less you know.”
“You mean you’re going to listen to what some 13-year-old kid tells you?”
“I listen to everything.”
The guy was my father all over again: RESPONSIBILITY, SOCIETY, COUNTRY, DUTY, MATURITY, all the dull-sounding hard words. But why were they in such agony? Why did they hate so much? It seemed simply that they were very much afraid that somebody else was having a damn good time or was not unhappy most of the time. It seemed that they wanted everybody to carry the same damn heavy rock they were carrying.
And that’s what killed you on the job-not the actual physical work but being closed in with the dead.
THERE ARE SO MANY STUPID THINGS TO DO THAT THERE ISN’T ANY TIME LEFT TO DO ANYTHING THAT ISN’T STUPID.
Everything looked better at night because you couldn’t see it as well.
Now, me, I’m crazy. I like solitude. I’ve never been lonely. There is something wrong with me.
The world is full of literary-hustlers and the less talent they have the more they hustle…
There were ten or fifteen letters. I read them. Everybody was lonely. Everybody was in agony.
Outside the cats played, the butterflies flew, the sun kept working. The party was over. Charles Bukowski was Hank again. Rent was needed. Food. Gasoline. Luck.
Somewhere in the structure of our society it is impossible for these people to contact each other. Churches, dances, parties only seem to push them further apart, and the dating clubs, the Computer Love Machines only destroy more and more a naturalness that should have been; a naturalness that has somehow been crushed and seems to remain crushed forever in our present method of living (dying).
Here they worked all week on jobs they hated, and now given the slightest bit of leisure time they wasted it, they murdered it.
Some of them are fairly attractive and most of them are well-dressed, but something has been beaten out of them. That 8-hour job of doing an obnoxious thing for their own survival and for somebody else’s profit had worked them over well.
Marriage is a contract to live in dullness until death do us part.
Hundreds of thousands of of lonely and frustrated men and women living mostly without sex and certainly without love, working jobs they hate, running red lights, crashing into fire plugs and store windows, gambling, drinking, taking dope, smoking 2 packs a day, masturbating, going crazy, going crazier and crazier, getting religious, buying goldfish and cats and monkeys…
I must guess that the United States must be the loneliest place in the world with England not far behind.
I tell you, we must be the most backward nation on earth.
You say they made a mistake? Would you like to be beaten by a dozen men and made into a sexual idiot? What judge passed that sentence?
We murder ourselves with sex and occupation; the madhouses crawl with sexually maladjusted and occupationally-destroyed people.
“You’re probably right, but I’m afraid that sometimes we still need guns just like we need knives and forks.”
“Silly,” she said, “you can’t eat with a gun!”
“A lot of people do,” I said.
It was a very nice sand castle. We both hated to leave it there like that, so we smashed it down with our feet. Then she held my hand as we walked across the sand toward the parking lot. There were quite some hours left in our Monday together and we needed something different to do.
I like Artaud, Celine, Dostoyevsky, Kafka and the STYLE of the early Saroyan without the content. Then maybe Eugene O’Neill or somebody like that. Most writers simply don’t have it and never will. There’s hardly any looking around, up, down, before and before that. A pack of shameful fakes. If I ever go to hell there will be all writers down there. There could be nothing worse.
The only good thing about writing is the writing itself-that is, to bring me closer to what is necessary NOW and to keep me from becoming anything like the first face I pass on a sidewalk on any given day. When I die they can take my work and wipe a cat’s ass with it. It will be of no earthly use to me. The only trace I want to leave, after death, is upon myself, and that isn’t important to you.
I can look at faces and become disgusted and terrorized and sickened. Others can find beauty in them like large fields of flowers. I guess I ain’t much of a man for that. I am narrow. I can’t see the horizons or the reasons or the excuses or the glories. The average face to me is a total nightmare.
They sell us the stuff to drink, don’t they? Then we drink it and they throw us in jail. I don’t understand.
So many people are doomed by their ambition and their gathered intelligence, their bank account and savings and loan and intelligence. If there is any secret to life, that secret is not to try. Let it come to you: women, dogs, death, and creation.
All men are born artists but most of them are quickly mutilated.
Being together is the miracle, being together and caring. Sleeping together, feet touching, legs touching. Being asleep and together. Only the strong can live alone, the strong and the selfish.
It’s good to eat with somebody, to listen to the rain with somebody, to get through Christmas and New Year’s and Labor Day with somebody, to see their ring of dirt in the bathtub, to look at a toilet they forgot to flush. And to have the sex get better and better…
I wrote something very bitter about humanity and love and the human race. Sometimes such things work, especially if they jell up fundamental truths instead of various self-pities. It didn’t work. I tore the pages out. Even when I wrote about unhappy things I usually had to be happy when I wrote.
I thought about the poet Jeffers who said there were traps everywhere, that they’d even trapped God when He came to earth.
Hate and love are very close.
There aren’t any good jobs. Everybody is fucked.
Jesus, he thought, we are all so mixed up. It’s all so sad and so wonderful.
The problem with being a drunk is that one usually knows other drunks.
Any person into living and creativity must discourage a certain number of visitors, if not most.
If you want to find what a person is like inside, take them to a racetrack and watch how they react to defeat.
…a man can be a good writer without being good at anything else; in fact, he can be pretty bad at everything else, and usually is. Of course, there are people who are pretty bad at everything else and they can’t write either.
I remembered starving in New York City, trying to be a writer. One night I had gone out and bought a bag of popcorn, it was my first food in several days. The popcorn was hot and greasy and salty, each kernel was a miracle. I walked along in a beautiful trance, feeling the kernels enter my body, feeling them in my mouth. My trance was not entirely complete. Two large men walked toward me. They were talking to each other. As they got closer to me, one of them looked up and just as they passed me he said loudly to his buddy: “Jesus Christ, did you see that.” I was the freak to them, the idiot, the one who didn’t fit the mold. I walked along then, the kernels not tasting quite so good.
I know that I am supposed to love my fellow man but I don’t. I don’t hate him; I often dislike him; I just don’t want him about. I feel better alone.
New Year’s Eve is like any other eve to me: I drink.
Fame is too often the result of bad public taste; immortality too often a matter of poor critical judgment.
When the agony of all the people is heard, nothing will be done.
The best people are the ones you never meet.
Will Rogers once said, “I never met a man I didn’t like.” I didn’t like Will Rogers.
It was a lonely world. With everybody pretending it wasn’t, pretending that they were handling it.
“You’ve got a certain cool that most guys don’t have.”
“I’m not cool,” I said, “I’m just tired.”
People wanted a loser who became a winner. Or a winner who became a loser. But a loser who stayed a loser? That was too much like themselves. They weren’t interested in themselves.
Growing was difficult, I did it so slowly and the years were running out.