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

"Show me an old poet and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master."

"The only thing intelligent about a good art is if it shakes you alive, otherwise it's hokum,"

"I think the letter itself is important as a form, just as the poet-form, and it has a way of saying that the poem-form does not, and also the other way around,"

"art is art and names are secondary. We are not politicians of the literary scene."

"The mass, both the actual mass and the Artistic mass (in the sense of large practicing numbers only) are always far behind, practicing safety not only in the material and economic life but in the life of the so-called soul."

" I am not addicted to reading my stuff after writing it. It's like hanging onto faded flowers."

"it's a man's own business if he'd rather fiddle with a poem than invest in real estate."

"That's the danger of talking. You talk talk talk all wax and wallow and pretty soon you don't know what you are saying... I don't... that's why I feel much better when I am mostly quiet."

"Perhaps the first atrocity was the human foot upon the untouched."

"Creation can't bear up under restrictions."

"I feel that I am too old to be destroyed - creatively - it's ingrained like death, no shaking it off."

"great Art is pure ranting in a golden cage."

"you compare only the best to the best. You can't help it. Once a man has leaped 18 feet straight up into the air and then comes back and only leaps 13 feet, it's just not enough for us."

"The first process of learning or creation is the undoing of teaching."

"I've found that the least talented scream the loudest,"

"I don't believe in pain as a pusher of art. Pain is too often. We can breathe without it. If it will let us."

"Writers seem to write to be known as writers."