"I thought about breakups, how difficult they were, but then usually it was only after you broke up with one woman that you met another. As a writer, I had to taste women in order to really know them, to get inside of them. I could invent men in my mind because I was one, but women, for me, were almost impossible to fictionalize without first knowing them. So I explored them as best I could and I found human beings inside. The writing would be forgotten. The writing would become much less than the episode itself until the episode ended. The writing was only the residue. A man didn't need to have a woman in order to feel as real as he could feel, but it was good if he knew a few. Then when the affair went wrong, he'd feel what it was like to be truly lonely and crazed, and thus know what he must face, finally, when his own end came.

I was sentimental about many things: a woman's shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, "I'm going to pee…"; hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking, talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes, the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3 AM; being told you snore, hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce, but always carrying on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she's now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; her dull friends, your dull friends; your drinking, her dancing; your flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side, and her doing the same; sleeping together…

There were no judgments to be made, yet out of necessity one had to select. Beyond good and evil was all right in theory, but to go on living one had to select: some were kinder than others, some were simply more interested in you, and sometimes the outwardly beautiful and inwardly cold were necessary, just for bloody, shitty kicks, like a bloody, shitty movie. The kinder ones fucked better, really, and after you were around them a while they seemed beautiful because they were." (...)
(pag.227)



"Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.
I took my choice. I raised the fifth of vodka and drank it sraight. The Russians knew something.
The door opened and Cecelia walked in. She looked good with her low-slung powerful body. Most American women were either too thin or without stamina. If you gave them rough use something broke in them and they become neurotic and their men became sport freaks or alcoholics or obsessed with cars. The Norwegians, the Icelanders, The Finns knew how a woman should be built: wide and solid, a big ass, big hips, big white flanks, big heads, big mouths, big tits, plenty of hair, big eyes, big nostrils, and down in the center - big enough and small enough (...)
(pag. 177)

Charles Bukowski, Women