जीवनी

His favorite movie was Eraserhead (1977), though he disliked director David Lynch after he met him, thinking that he and his wife Isabella Rossellini, put on airs of superiority around him. Although Bukowski often claimed he hadn't seen any movie since The Lost Weekend (1945) until he got involved in making Barfly (1987), other films he said he liked were One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

Headstone reads "Don't Try"

Loved to listen to classical music on the radio as he wrote (and drank).

The Crossing Guard (1995), directed by Sean Penn, concludes with a dedication to "My friend, Charles Bukowski. I miss you, S.P.".

He had two stories published by the time he was 24 but gave up writing shortly afterwards to work in the post office. He did not write again for ten years and did not become a full-time professional until he was 49 years old.

When I write, when I'm going hot, I don't want to write more than four hours in a row. After that you're pushing it. The horses [horse races] give me something to do. At the age of 50 I quit a job at the post office and decided to become a full-time writer. The old guy's crazy, my landlady declared, striking her head with her palm. I wrote my first novel, named "Post Office", in nineteen nights, working on Scotch and beer. I had prepared by going to L.A. City College and taking journalism. They taught me how to type.(...)I just got an electric a couple of years ago. At the first, I was a starving writer. I went from 190 pounds down to 130. Everything I put in the mail came right back to me. The Atlantic, Harper's, The New Yorker, they rejected everything. I threw it all away. I started out again, selling to the porno mags. What I used to do was, write a good story and throw in some goddamn sex. It worked. I only got one story rejected - it had too much sex! They draw a fine line. 'Bukowski,' the editor wrote me, 'nobody on earth screws that many women in a week and a half!'[1987]

"I never realized that there were so many movie magazines or magazines interested in the movies. It was a sickness. This great interest in a medium that relentlessly and consistently failed, time after time after time, to produce anything at all. People became so used to seeing shit on film that they no longer realized is WAS shit." -From 'Hollywood', on his experience writing "Barfly".

I was born in Andernach, Germany in the 1920s to an American soldier and a German mother. Moved to Los Angeles when I was about 3. I published my first short story, 'Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip', when I was 24. From 1945 to 1955, I published only a few short stories then I published my first poetry at 35. I've never been lonely. I've been in a room - I've felt suicidal. I've been depressed. I've felt awful - awful beyond all - but I've never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me... or that any number of people could....

It was true that I didn't have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. 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?

-Factotum, 1975

People who drink and still function say they're not alcoholics. I don't see what one has to do with the other. Whether you're an alcoholic and whether you function are two different questions.[1987]