A Bukowski line that made you laugh out loud!

Purple Stickpin

Purple Stickpin

MULLINAX said:
Thanks. That's the BRITISH edition, as opposed to what BS put out.
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Yes, I have the Virgin Books letter versions also - four volumes (comprising Screams from the Balcony, Living on Luck, and Reach for the Sun):

'58-'65
'65-'70
'71-'86
'87-'94

They were at a used bookstore here, so I scooped 'em up, just so I could leave my BSP volumes in better shape. Great for reading on the crapper. Well, what Buk isn't great for reading on the crapper?:p
 
ROC

ROC

It is what it is
That's exactly why I bought them.
Well, sort of.
I keep one or two in the car, as our 1 year old boy is likely to fall asleep as soon as we arrive somewhere. Now I just sit in the car and read Buks letters until he wakes up.

So... the car and the crapper. :)
 
bluebottle

bluebottle

Founding member
adrian said:
"Sunbeam" :D
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this is funny. whenever i'm doing something boring and repetitive i always think of chinaski yelling out "SUNBEAM!" and everybody cracking up about it. also from the same story i think is another one of my favorite funny lines: "fluff it, motherfucker." haha! every morning in the mirror when i'm trying to figure out my hair, i say, "fluff it, motherfucker." and when biding my time, evading work, wandering around trying to look busy, i say to myself, "fluff it motherfucker."
 
Purple Stickpin

Purple Stickpin

Apparently, ROC, you don't spend enough time on the crapper!;)

My favorite line, amongst so very many, especially in Women, is from Ham on Rye: Whilst Buk and Red were in the pool.

"You dirty little pervert, you're trying for free grabs"...

...He grabbed my cunt!...

{and here's the line}

..."Lady," said the man, "the boy probably thought it was the grate over the drain."

I can't tell you how many times I woke up laughing my ass off about that line.
 
Ryan Chinaski

Ryan Chinaski

People always talked about the good clean smell of fresh sweat. They had to make excuses for it. They never talked about the good clean smell of fresh shit.
 
rjwink666

rjwink666

I've always liked
"Dear Mr Bukowski:
You say you began writing at 35. what were you doing before then?
E.R."

"Dear E.R.
Not writing"

from Notes....
 
number6horse

number6horse

okyoutwopixiesoutyougo
I still have 1964 and 1965 to go yet, but I've found some great insights so far. He was absolutely thrilled when Jon and Louise Webb published his book It Catches My Heart In Its Hands. He sounds like a kid at Christmas writing them and thanking them. This is quite a contrast to the "indifferent Buk" who usually kept his distance and was distrustful of success, fame, etc...Also, the absolute devastation he felt over the death of Jane. He was not himself and basically couldn't write for a while afterwards. Not that this is a surprise, but you know - the "guarded,above-it-all Buk" image.... He also pours his heart out to one Ann Bauman a couple times. Sometimes in a flirtatious, romantic way, and in one instance, in a very depressed and suicidal way. Very compelling stuff. This Seamus Conney fellow arranges the material in a very readable manner. And, yes, he acknowledges that the material first appeared in Screams From The Balcony and Living On Luck.
 
MilDot

MilDot

The perfect description of my life:

"Was I some kind of idiot, actually? Did I make things happen to myself? It was possible. It was possible that I was subnormal, that I was lucky just to be alive."

-Post Office p. 27 just after he lost the clipboard.
 
D

daveok

"this is a work of fiction and any resemblance between the characters and persons living or dead is purely coincidental, etc."
 
Black Swan

Black Swan

Abord the Yorikke!
No kiddin...
"I was then 8 or ten inches tall. I was growing. I even scared pigeons. When you scare pigeons you know you are getting there."
 
Father Luke

Father Luke

Founding member
right.

I was then 8 or ten inches tall. I was growing.
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purple and eight or ten inches, and growing. you got it.
keep 'em coming.

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74FB004BE0A0521C10F8C781A2F1CD4D.png
 
A

adrian

Can't remember where this one is from but I burst out laughing at reading it. Perfect way to disarm someone and shut them up at the same time

"just who the hell do you think you are?" :mad:

"I don't know" :D
 
S

Sircha

the last lines of "eating the father" (as recited by Bukowski)

I suppose I would have done
the same thing without even asking
god
but I think a better photograph
would have been of the remains
of the father
something like
an after Thanksgiving
turkey
 
HarryC13

HarryC13

RIP
Well, there's always the line "Vera, I'd like to jam a live codfish up your ass!" from a story in Erections ... ... or in Women where he gives the four Mexican kids 50 cents and thinks, IMMORTAL WRITER COMES TO AID OF STREET URCHINS ... but my fave may be also from Women. He's been seeing a woman named Sara who refuses to have sex with him because she is the follower of this Indian guru named Dreyer Baba. So finally, on New Year's Eve, she has sex with him, and afterwards, he looks up at the ceiling and says:

"... Dreyer Baba, forgive her ... But since he never talked and he never touched money I could neither expect an answer nor could I pay him."
 
Amber

Amber

Where I found this, I don't know, but I carry it written on a piece of paper in my purse:

"I don't know about other people, but when I bend over to put on my shoes in the morning, I think, Christ almighty, now what."
 
HarryC13

HarryC13

RIP
Black Swan said:
No kiddin...
"I was then 8 or ten inches tall. I was growing. I even scared pigeons."
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And earlier on in Six Inches, when she is using him as a dildo and then brings him up to her face and says, "Come! You damned fiend of a thing! Come!"

For some reason, that always cracks me up.
 
Bukfan

Bukfan

"The law is wrong; I am right"
These lines from, "All The Great Writers" (from "The Most Beautiful Woman In Town"), always cracks me up:

"and when I was in college, all these guys walking around the locker rooms, real cool like ya know? why one guy even had BALLS down to his KNEES! we used to call him BEACHBALLS HARRY. after BEACHBALLS HARRY came, baby, it was all OVER! like a waterhose spurting curdled cream! when that stuff dried...why, man in the morning he'd have to beat the sheets with a baseball bat, shake the flakes off before he sent it to the laundry..." :D
 
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Purple Stickpin

Purple Stickpin

Another great line is from Women. Of course, there are so many great lines from that. After stumbling over the bed frame, and cutting his ankle, and bleeding like a...can't say it, sorry.

"Henry Chinaski is, without a doubt, the greatest one-legged poet in the world."

I still can't read that line in context without pissing me pants.:D

I may have posted this already, but this thread is old.
 
P

privileged

RubyRed that's one of my favorites too.

Mildot, I have quoted that one in emails to friends before detailing stories of my own idiocies.

"love is for guitar players, catholics, and chess freaks"

"I don't know what happened to the track star. He just ran off I guess."

I love that one. The only instance of Bukowski punning? Low key anyway...

and a couple other lines in women i can't recall right now.
 
M

Moose

Which poem

mjp said:
wallclockNEW.jpg


Sometimes I laugh when something is just so damn good.
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Which work is the line, ""they thought I had guts but they had it all wrong" from? I have only read Factotum and Post Office and I am soon going to hit Ham on Rye, Slouching Toward Nirvana and South of No North.
 
hank solo

hank solo

Just practicin' steps and keepin' outta the fights
Moderator
Founding member
Moose said:
Which work is the line, ""they thought I had guts but they had it all wrong" from?
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It's from a poem called 'wall clock' which appears in the collection 'Open All Night'.
 
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