Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Bukowski

"I've never been lonely. I've been in a room... I've felt suicidal, I've been depressed. I've felt awful ... awful beyond all , but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude"

Charles Bukowski, Poet

About this Quote

Bukowski draws a hard line between loneliness and solitude, and the cut is deliberate. Loneliness, in the common sentimental script, is the ache for company; his point is that the real ache is internal and immune to an audience. The image of “a room” is doing double duty: it’s depression’s claustrophobic enclosure, but also the writer’s chosen cell. Even at his bleakest - “suicidal”, “awful beyond all” - he refuses the consoling fantasy that another person could step in and fix it. That refusal is both honesty and armor.

The subtext is classic Bukowski: contempt for easy therapeutic narratives, suspicion of people as cure-alls, and a rough pride in self-sufficiency that borders on self-punishment. Notice how the line “any number of people” escalates the rejection from romance to community to humanity. If a crowd can’t rescue you, you’re absolved from seeking one. Solitude becomes not just preference but strategy: a way to turn suffering into a private resource, something he can metabolize into art instead of negotiating it socially.

Context matters. Bukowski’s work emerged from mid-century American grit: cheap rooms, dead-end jobs, bars, the masculinity of endurance, the writer myth of the outsider who “needs” isolation. Calling it an “itch” is key: solitude isn’t noble; it’s compulsive. He’s confessing a craving that protects him from loneliness, yes, but also keeps him close to the very darkness he claims no one else could cure.

Quote Details

Topic	Loneliness
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About the Author

Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski (August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was a Poet from USA.

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