"Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was"
About this Quote
The rhetoric works because it’s violently bodily. “Soul like a rocket”, “sun inside you”, “burning your gut” turns creativity into pressure, heat, indigestion - not inspiration with a halo. He’s stripping away the polite myth of the writer as refined observer and replacing it with the writer as barely contained hazard. Even the extreme trio “madness or suicide or murder” is doing double duty: it shocks, but it also suggests the stakes feel criminally high inside the artist, as if not making the work is itself a kind of violence.
The subtext is fatalistic, almost religious: “if you have been chosen”. That phrasing flatters and condemns. It offers no practical roadmap, only a test of possession: the work will “do it by itself”, through you, until one of you dies. In context, it’s classic Bukowski: anti-career, anti-institution, suspicious of craft talk, forged in a life of grinding jobs, drinking, and marginality. It’s also a defensive myth - a way to sanctify suffering and to justify a brute, prolific output as necessity rather than ambition.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Charles Bukowski, “So You Want To Be A Writer?” |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Bukowski, Charles. (2026, February 10). Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/unless-it-comes-out-of-your-soul-like-a-rocket-185129/
Chicago Style
Bukowski, Charles. "Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was." FixQuotes. February 10, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/unless-it-comes-out-of-your-soul-like-a-rocket-185129/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was." FixQuotes, 10 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/unless-it-comes-out-of-your-soul-like-a-rocket-185129/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
