Anderson Hauptli's Key Ideas from On Drinking
by Charles Bukowski

"Sunday night in Los Angeles is the graveyard of the nation, they are all waiting for Monday morning."

"Now and then, though, a poet does fall upon a magic audience where everything is right. I can't explain how this works. It is very strange - it is as if the poet were the audience and the audience were the poet. It all flows."

"You could never underestimate an audience. They had paid to get in: they had paid for drinks; they intended to get something and if you didn't give it to them they'd run you right into the ocean."

"As I write this I am listening to something on the radio that I have never heard before. I feast on each note like a man starving for a new rush of blood and meaning and it's there. I am totally astonished by the mass of great music, centuries and centuries of it. It must be that many great souls once lived."

"I disliked Hollywood, the movies seldom ever worked for me. What was I doing with these people? Was I being sucked in? 72 years of fighting the good fight, then to be sucked away?"

"Some critics say I write the same thing over and over, well, sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, but when I do the reason is that it feels so good, it's like I'm making love to myself, but not really - it's to this machine."