Time & Perspective Quote by Charles Bukowski

A Bukowski line like this isn’t a gentle plea for “authenticity”. It’s a barroom ultimatum, spat through a hangover: if it doesn’t bleed, don’t bring it over. “No time” is the tell. He’s not weighing pros and cons; he’s declaring a survival rule from someone who treated attention like rent money - scarce, hard-earned, and easily wasted. The bluntness is part of the poetry. It performs the impatience it preaches.

“Soul” here isn’t church-talk. It’s an anti-bureaucratic signal flare. Bukowski spent his life snarling at the polished and the performative: respectable careers, tidy aesthetics, art that smells like grant applications. Calling something “soulless” is his catchall indictment of anything too clean, too managed, too safe - work that never risks embarrassment, people who never risk sincerity. He’s drawing a moral line with an aesthetic term, which is exactly his trick: he makes taste sound like ethics.

The subtext is defensive as much as it’s defiant. If you’ve lived close to failure, you start treating “dead” experiences as threats, not inconveniences. “Things” is broad on purpose: objects, jobs, conversations, institutions. Anything that turns a person into a cog qualifies. The quote flatters itself as rugged truth-telling, but it’s also a self-justification: a way to sanctify refusal, to make loneliness look like standards. That tension - contempt as a shield, tenderness smuggled in as “soul” - is where Bukowski’s voice still lands.