Genuine, and traceable to a specific issue. It is the line that closes the famous run of “We are here to…” sentences in the short statement Bukowski contributed to LIFE magazine’s feature The Meaning of Life: The Big Picture in December 1988 — a paragraph that begins by rejecting “the God formula”. Wikiquote’s sourced list and the WIST quotation database both carry the paragraph under that citation, ending at this sentence; The Marginalian, reproducing the 1991 Little, Brown collection, prints one further sentence after it — “We are here to read these words from all these wise men and women who will tell us that we are here for different reasons and the same reason.”
“We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us” Charles Bukowski, in "The Meaning of Life: The Big Picture," LIFE magazine, December 1988. Verified by Quotle.info.
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In context
Evoking the world of Charles Bukowski — American poet, novelist and short-story writer. Theme: "We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The source
Feature
The Meaning of Life: The Big Picture
Published in
LIFE magazine, December 1988
Collected in
The Meaning of Life: Reflections in Words and Pictures on Why We Are Here (Little, Brown, 1991)
Author
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994)
For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. We are here to read these words from all these wise men and women who will tell us that we are here for different reasons and the same reason.
The line that circulates
The line that circulates is the fourth of the five “We are here to…” sentences, not the end of the passage. The sources differ on where the passage stops: Wikiquote and the WIST database end at the famous line, while The Marginalian, reproducing the 1991 Little, Brown collection, prints the closing “We are here to read these words…” sentence after it, which is the version given above. Renderings also differ trivially on “stone-written” / “stonewritten”; the famous sentence itself is quoted consistently and without alteration.
Wikiquote ↗ carries the paragraph in its sourced material, cited to “The Meaning of Life: The Big Picture”, LIFE magazine (December 1988) — not in any misattributed or disputed section.
The WIST quotation database ↗ files the same paragraph under the same LIFE citation, and The Marginalian ↗ reproduces it in its piece on the feature and the 1991 Little, Brown book that collected the responses.
A long-running Bukowski Forum thread ↗ records readers tracking the line to that issue and posting the magazine page. The forum places Bukowski’s answer on page 8, while the dealer’s contents listing below indexes the feature at page 76, so we cite the issue rather than a page.
A dealer listing for the December 1988 issue ↗ independently confirms the magazine ran the feature, describing it as a portfolio in which “philosophers, pundits and plain folk ponder what it’s all about.”
This passage was first published in LIFE in December 1988 and collected in a Little, Brown volume in 1991 — both far too recent for US public domain, which as of 2026 reaches only works published before 1931. The paragraph is quoted here in brief for identification and comment; rights remain with Bukowski’s estate and the original publishers.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Right author, wrong provenance
There is nothing wrong with the name on this one. What travels badly is everything else — where it came from, what form it was written in, and the four sentences in front of it.
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The sourceQuote-aggregator sites no source given
Goodreads carries the line with a bare author byline and no publication at all, above its own notice that community-added quotes are not verified — which is how a line with a precise, checkable citation ends up looking rootless. See the Goodreads entry ↗.
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The formSocial posts presenting it as a Bukowski poem prose, not verse
It is often line-broken and posted as poetry, sometimes folded in with The Laughing Heart. It is not a poem: Wikiquote ↗ carries it as one continuous prose paragraph from a magazine feature.
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The contextInspirational reposts cut short
The sentences that set it up — “I am my own God” and “We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our educational system” — are almost always dropped, turning an explicitly godless credo into a generic toast. The Marginalian ↗ prints the whole answer.
✓It really is Bukowski, and it really has a citation: a line from his statement in “The Meaning of Life: The Big Picture,” LIFE, December 1988 — documented in WIST ↗ and in Wikiquote’s sourced list ↗.
Context
Why the full paragraph matters
In 1988 the editors of LIFE put one question to roughly 300 people — the Dalai Lama, Rosa Parks, Richard Nixon, farmers, barbers — and printed the answers as a portfolio called The Meaning of Life: The Big Picture. Bukowski, then living in San Pedro and long past needing to be polite about it, sent back a paragraph that opens by ruling God out and then simply lists what is left: unlearn the church, the state and the schools; drink beer; kill war; laugh at the odds. The famous sentence is the fourth item on that list, and in the fullest reproduction of the answer a fifth follows it, turning to the reader and to the other contributors.
Detached, the line reads like a toast — which is why it ends up on posters, tattoos and graduation cards. In place, it is the punchline of an argument: if there is nobody to appeal to and nothing written in stone, then living well is not a reward for anything, it is the whole of the available response. The reposts almost always cut the four sentences that make that argument.
I am my own God.
What happened to the LIFE feature afterwards
The responses were gathered into a book — The Meaning of Life: Reflections in Words and Pictures on Why We Are Here, credited to David Friend and the Editors of Life and published by Little, Brown in 1991 — pairing the statements with photographs from the LIFE archive. A scan of that first edition is held by the Internet Archive.
LIFE ran the feature in December 1988, and Bukowski died in March 1994. He kept publishing throughout those years — Hollywood (1989), Septuagenarian Stew (1990), The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992) — but this was one of the few times a mass-circulation American magazine asked him to state his own position outright.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1920–1994 · American poet, novelist and short-story writer
Born Heinrich Karl Bukowski in Andernach, Germany, in 1920 and raised in Los Angeles, Bukowski spent much of his working life as a letter carrier and filing clerk for the U.S. Post Office, quitting in 1969 to write full time. Black Sparrow Press published nearly everything that followed — Post Office (1971), Factotum (1975), Women (1978), Ham on Rye (1982) — and by the late 1980s he was famous enough that a mass-circulation American magazine would ask him what life meant. He died in San Pedro, California, in March 1994.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
How to cite this
Charles Bukowski, contribution to “The Meaning of Life: The Big Picture,” LIFE, December 1988; the feature’s responses were collected in David Friend and the Editors of Life, The Meaning of Life: Reflections in Words and Pictures on Why We Are Here (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/we-are-here-to-laugh-at-the-odds-and-live-our-lives-so-well/