The movie "Barfly" is based on Charles Bukowski's life, capturing his misanthropic yet relatable spirit and the emptiness of conventional lives, expressed through his character Henry Chinaski's drunken philosophical musings on love, work, and survival in dive bars.
Charles Bukowski, born Heinrich Karl Bukowski in Germany in 1920, was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His books address the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. He died in 1994.
I discovered Bukowski's writing too late which is probably just as well, as earlier I could not have related to some of his quotes as I can now:
“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
“That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”
“Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Bach, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.”
“People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.”
“Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn't so.”
“I wasn't a misanthrope and I wasn't a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.”
“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 never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me ... or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude. It's being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness."
“Human relationships are strange. I mean, you are with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stops.”
“There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.”
“Are you becoming what you've always hated?”
The last two quotes ring particularly true because I now have too much money and also become what I've always hated: a domesticated animal wanting to be alone but no longer capable of being alone. As he wrote, “I don't hate people ... I just feel better when they're not around.”
