Hollywood - Charles Bukowski

9
"We have just landed upon the outpost of death.  My soul is puking."
"Will you stop worrying about your soul?"

10
It opened to this tall slim delicate type, you smelled artistry all over him.  You could see he had been born to Create, to Create grand things, totally unhindered, never bothered by such petty things as toothache, self-doubt, lousy luck.  He was one of those who looked like a genius.  I looked like a dishwasher so these types always pissed me just a bit.

23
"I probably would have lost anyhow.  A gambler without an excuse is a gambler who can't continue."

26
I looked in the mirror.  I liked myself but I didn't like myself in the mirror.  I didn't look like that.  I finished my drink.

39

LUKE
Isn't there another part of you somewhere?

YOUNG MAN
Well, shit.  I was in the 6th grade, I think.  The teacher asked us to write something about our most moving experience.  And I don't mean like moving to Denver.

Anyhow, I wrote about this frog I found in the garden.  He had one of his legs caught in a wire fence.  He couldn't get away.  I got his leg out of the wire fence but he still wouldn't move.

So I held him in my lap and talked to him.  I told him that I was trapped, that my life was caught in something too.  I talked to him for a long tmie.  At last he hopped out of my lp and hopped across the lawn and vanished into some brush.  And I said to myself that he was the first things that I had ever missed in my life.

The teacher read it to the class.  Everybody cried.  Well, I thought that some day I might be a writer.

120
"I want a castle, I want 6 children and a big fat wife.  So when I lose at gambling somebody will take to me.  Now when I lose at gambling nobody talks to me."
I wanted to suggest that when he lost at gambling maybe a fat wife and 6 chlidren might not talk to him either.  But I didn't.  Francois was suffering enough. 

165
Sarah found people to talk to.  She was lucky.  Every time somebody spoke to me I felt like diving out a window or taking the elevator down.  People just weren't interesting.  Maybe they weren't supposed to be.  But animals, birds, even insects were.  I couldn't understand it.

232
Maybe they were waiting for me to get drunk and insane and abusive like I sometimes did at parties.  But I doubted that.  They were just dull inside.  there was nothing for them to do bus stay within the self that was not quite there.  That wasn't too painful.  It was a soft place to be.