The first three or four days at Mears-Starbuck were identical. In fact, similarity was a very dependable thing at Mears-Starbuck. The caste system was an accepted fact. There wasn’t a s...

I walked off the job again and the police stopped me for running a red light at Serrano… my mind was rather gone and I stood in a patch of leaves

I get many phonecalls now. They are all alike. “are you Charles Bukowski, the writer?” “yes,” I tell them.

At 3:30 a.m. my twelve hours were… I set the alarm so that I would b… “What happened, Hank? We thought… “I’m quitting.” “Quitting?” “Yes, you can’t blame a man for wa…

a symphony orchestra. there is a thunderstorm, they are playing a Wagner overture and the people leave their seats u… and run inside to the pavilion

he was just a cat cross-eyed, dirty white with pale blue eyes

all of a sudden I’m a painter. a girl from Galveston gives me $50 for a painting of a man holding a candycane while floating in a darkened sky.

was much easier to be a genius in… only 3 or 4 literary magazines and… or 5 times you could end up in Ger… you could possibly meet Picasso fo… maybe only Miró.

of course, I may die in the next t… and I’m ready for that but what I’m really worried about… that my editor—publisher might ret… even though he is ten years younge…

twitching in the sheets— to face the sunlight again, that’s clearly trouble. I like the city better when the

Jack London drinking his life awa… writing of strange and heroic men. Eugene O’Neill drinking himself o… while writing his dark and poetic works.

Dee Dee had to pick up her son at the airport. He was coming home from England for his vacation. He was 17, she told me, and his father was an ex-concert pianist. But he’d fallen for sp...