"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way"
About this Quote
Bukowski is needling the kind of brainy performance that turns clarity into a status symbol. The first line lands like a barroom heckle aimed at “the intellectual” as a type: someone who can’t just hand you the truth, has to wrap it in credentials, hedges, and a vocabulary that works like a velvet rope. It’s not anti-thinking so much as anti-posturing. He’s calling out a cultural economy where difficulty is mistaken for depth, where sounding smart becomes more rewarded than being understood.
Then he flips the insult into a defense of craft. “An artist says a hard thing in a simple way” is a claim about compression: the brutal labor of making complexity feel inevitable. Great art doesn’t avoid hard truths; it smuggles them into the reader’s bloodstream using rhythm, image, and plain speech. Simplicity here isn’t simplicity of thought, it’s simplicity of delivery - a style that refuses to telegraph how much work went into it.
The subtext is Bukowski’s own position in the literary ecosystem: the working-class poet who distrusted institutions, workshops, and polite “Literature,” while still obsessing over line-level precision. Coming out of mid-century American letters, where academia increasingly set the terms of taste, he’s staking a rival authority: the artist’s credibility comes from accuracy and nerve, not from jargon. The wit is that it’s also a neat little epigram - a simple thing said sharply - proving its own point.
Then he flips the insult into a defense of craft. “An artist says a hard thing in a simple way” is a claim about compression: the brutal labor of making complexity feel inevitable. Great art doesn’t avoid hard truths; it smuggles them into the reader’s bloodstream using rhythm, image, and plain speech. Simplicity here isn’t simplicity of thought, it’s simplicity of delivery - a style that refuses to telegraph how much work went into it.
The subtext is Bukowski’s own position in the literary ecosystem: the working-class poet who distrusted institutions, workshops, and polite “Literature,” while still obsessing over line-level precision. Coming out of mid-century American letters, where academia increasingly set the terms of taste, he’s staking a rival authority: the artist’s credibility comes from accuracy and nerve, not from jargon. The wit is that it’s also a neat little epigram - a simple thing said sharply - proving its own point.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by Charles
Add to List
