Life & Mortality Quote by Charles Bukowski

Bukowski builds a grim little altar to the idea that art is made out of selfishness, then dares you to judge him for worshipping there. The opening jab, "great writers are indecent people", is less confession than preemptive strike: he frames artistic seriousness as a kind of moral deficit, a willingness to raid life for material and withhold tenderness for the page. "They live unfairly" lands like working-class resentment turned inward - the sense that the writer is always taking, always keeping a private stash of experience to cash in later as prose.

The pivot to "good human beings" is where the cruelty gets interesting. He casts decency as infrastructure: anonymous caretakers who "save the world" not for glory but so the artist can keep indulging his hunger. It's gratitude and contempt braided together. Calling himself a "bastard" performs self-awareness while also laundering it; if he admits he's rotten, he can keep being rotten with a cleaner conscience. The line "become immortal" gives away the real addiction. Bukowski isn't romantic about beauty; he's brutally romantic about endurance.

Then comes the final dare: "if you read this after I am dead it means I made it". It's both pathetic and shrewd. He reduces literary success to the simplest metric - posthumous readership - and turns the reader into a witness at his trial. The subtext is that the only absolution he believes in is attention that outlives him, the one kind of forgiveness he can't drink away.