Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Bukowski

Bukowski frames neediness as a kind of grim ecology: appetite, supply, contamination. The line starts with swagger - "People need me" - but it’s the sort of bravado that curdles fast. His verb choices do the work. "Fill" makes the poet sound less like a priest of meaning and more like a bartender, a dealer, a cheap diner. He’s not offering enlightenment; he’s offering relief. Then comes the hangover logic: deprivation makes the audience "desperate" and "sick", but exposure makes the artist sick too. Dependence cuts both ways, and Bukowski refuses the comforting fantasy of the endlessly available, endlessly generous creator.

The subtext is a hostile intimacy. He wants to be necessary, yet he resents what that necessity demands: attention, performance, access. The "people" here aren’t a community; they’re an appetite with faces. Bukowski’s genius is making the transaction feel bodily. Art becomes feeding, and feeding becomes a risk of infection - emotional, psychic, alcoholic, whatever self-erasure the crowd asks for. That last sentence, "It's hard to feed without getting fed", is the bleak punchline: even the giver is hungry, even the cynic wants sustenance.

Context matters. Bukowski built a brand on outsider authenticity, writing from the gutter while becoming a cult object. The quote reads like a defensive memo from someone who knows his persona sells, knows the audience wants more of the raw stuff, and suspects the exchange will kill him if he doesn’t ration it. It’s not romance about art; it’s labor, dependency, and recoil.