Charles Bukowski - 1920-1994
if it doesn't come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don't do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter searching for words, don't do it. if you're doing it for money or fame, don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want women in your bed, don't do it. if you have to sit there and rewrite it again and again, don't do it. if it's hard work just thinking about doing it, don't do it. if you're trying to write like somebody else, forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. if it never does roar out of you, do something else. if you first have to read it to your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your parents or to anybody at all, you're not ready.
don't be like so many writers, don't be like so many thousands of people who call themselves writers, don't be dull and boring and pretentious, don't be consumed with self- love. the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind.
don't add to that. don't do it. unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.
Charles Bukowski - 1920-1994
Charles Bukowski was a prolific underground writer who used his poetry and prose to depict the depravity of urban life and the downtrodden in American society.
Bukowski wrote more than forty books of poetry, prose and novels. Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wail (1959), Bukowski’s first book of poetry, covers the major interests and themes that occupy many of his works, especially “the sense of a desolate, abandoned world,” R. R. Cuscaden pointed out in the Outsider.
Bukowski’s short stories and novels are unsparingly realistic and usually comic.
In a letter to a friend, writer and publisher William Packard, he wrote,
“Too many writers write for the wrong reasons.”
“They want to get famous or they want to get rich or they want girls with the bluebells in their hair…
When everything goes best, it’s not because you chose writing, but because writing chose you.”
“We work too hard. We try too hard,” Bukowski wrote. “Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. Looking right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb.”
"There’s been too much direction. It’s all free, we needn’t be told."
Great writers write because they need to. They have no other option.
If you’re going to try, go all the way or else don't even start!
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