Love & Passion Quote by Charles Bukowski

Bukowski turns the romantic fantasy of the suffering artist into a grubby punchline, and that’s the point: he’s refusing to let “writing” sit on a pedestal. The simile starts like a cliché about seduction and ends as a transaction, yanking intimacy into the harsh light of rent money. It’s funny in a way that stings, because it treats art less like spiritual calling and more like a hustler’s miracle: you get the pleasure, then you get paid.

The intent is double-edged. On one side, it’s brag and bravado, the Bukowski persona as a guy who can’t resist appetite - sex, drink, language - and doesn’t apologize for wanting cash. On the other, it’s a swipe at the myth that real art must be pure, unpaid, and miserable. He’s telling you the clean moral narrative (work hard, earn respect, suffer nobly) is fake. Sometimes the world coughs up a reward after you’ve done what you were going to do anyway.

The subtext is also about control and indignity. Writing, like sex in the quote, is framed as something he enters for desire, but the money afterward complicates it: validation arrives as payment, not applause. There’s gratitude in the image, but also a faint shame, as if success feels suspiciously unearned or sordid.

Context matters: Bukowski wrote from the margins - dead-end jobs, betting slips, small magazines - then became bankable precisely because he sold a myth of unvarnished authenticity. The line is his self-aware advertisement: art as vice, vice as livelihood, and cynicism as charm.