Against the wall, the firing squad ready. Then he got a reprieve. Suppose they had shot Dostoevsky? Before he wrote all that? I suppose it wouldn’t have mattered, not directly. There are billions of people who have never read him and never will. But as a young man I know that he got me through the factories, past the whores, lifted me high through the night and put me down in a better place. Even while in the bar drinking with the other derelicts, I was glad they gave Dostoevsky a  reprieve, it gave me one, allowed me to look directly at those rancid faces in my world, death pointing its finger, I held fast, an immaculate drunk sharing the stinking dark with my brothers.

- Bukowski, “Dostoevsky”