You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. It could mean not eating for three or four days. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. To celebrate his birthday here’s a list of my favorite Bukowski quotes (there’s a searchable archive of his work here): I’m still catching up on his poems, the work Bukowski perhaps did best, but I’ll get there soon. I thought the movie Factotum was much better, and funnier, than Barfly. I know, from the documentaries, he was a bum, a drunk and a jerk, and I accept that since he seemed to have. He spent, as most writer’s do, a career in obscurity, but late in his life, to his surprise, and many others fame came his way. Much like Henry Miller’s non-fiction, Bukowski believed that, even as a drunk, if he were honest and treated his thoughts like a craftsman would, he’d be a rare voice in the literary world. He seemed like a terrible person in many ways but there was something oddly refreshing about how little he tried to hide it. There were no grand flourishes or overwrought metaphors. Unlike the majority of writers he wasn’t primarily interested in impressing anyone.

He gave me Post Office, about Bukowski’s drunken Kakfaesque experiences as as poet working with mail. It was my friend Rich Grudman who first told me to read Bukowski.

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