Of the beat writers, only William Burroughs had given Bukowski the cold shoulder, snubbing him at a reading, which was ironic because Burroughs was the only one he admired. Bukowski muttered about going outside and fighting him. “I could push him over with one punch,” he told Harold Norse, who knew them both. “Yeah, but you’d be dead,” said Norse. “He’d shoot you.”

From Howard Sounes’ Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, Edinburgh: Rebel Inc., 1999 (first published in 1998), p. 141.