New Delhi, April 6 -- "An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way."

This is Charles Bukowski at his most Bukowski, cutting, precise, and containing more truth per word than most essays three pages long. The line is constructed as a perfect mirror: two sentences, same structure, opposite meaning. And in the contrast between them, an entire argument about what art is actually for.

Bukowski did not like pretension. He distrusted it the way a person distrusts something that has hurt them before. He spent enough time on the outside of literary respectability to develop a clear eye for the difference between language that illuminates and language that performs.

This quote is the result of t...