"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?"

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

"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."

"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."

"I found trouble, but the rest if what I was looking for, I haven't found that yet, maybe we find it when we die, maybe we don't. you've got your books of philosophy, your priest, your preacher, your scientist, so don't ask me."

"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."

"Then I knew that he has decided that I was not such a good writer after all. Maybe even a bad writer. Well, no man can hide forever."

Charles Bukowski has always been one of my favorite writers. This book is a collection of poems, stories, and written materials on his extensive relationship with alcohol.

The definitive collection of works on a subject that inspired and haunted Charles Bukowski for his entire life: alcohol Charles Bukowski turns to the bottle in this revelatory collection of poetry and prose that includes some of the writer’s best and most lasting work. A self-proclaimed “dirty old man,” Bukowski used alcohol as muse and as fuel, a conflicted relationship responsible for some of his darkest moments as well as some of his most joyful and inspired. In On Drinking, Bukowski expert Abel Debritto has collected the writer’s most profound, funny, and memorable work on his ups and downs with the hard stuff—a topic that allowed Bukowski to explore some of life’s most pressing questions. Through drink, Bukowski is able to be alone, to be with people, to be a poet, a lover, and a friend—though often at great cost. As Bukowski writes in a poem simply titled “Drinking,”: “for me/it was or/is/a manner of/dying/with boots on/and gun/smoking and a/symphony music background.” On Drinking is a powerful testament to the pleasures and miseries of a life in drink, and a window into the soul of one of our most beloved and enduring writers.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

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