Quotes by Leonard Cohen
I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability.
Out of the thousands who are known or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts, trying to look like the real thing.
We're in a world where there's famine and hunger and people are dodging bullets and having their nails pulled out in dungeons so it's very hard for me to place any high value on the work that I do to write a song. Yeah, I work hard but compared to what?
The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.
Most of the time one is discouraged by the work, but now and again by some grace something stands out and invites you to work on it, to elaborate it or animate it in some way. It's a mysterious process.
Journalists, especially English journalists, were very cruel to me. They said I only knew three chords when I knew five!
I was 15 when I first became deeply touched by the rhythm and structure of words.
Music is the emotional life of most people.
When things get really bad, just raise your glass and stamp your feet and do a little jig. That's about all you can do.
We're always experiencing joy or sadness. But there are lots of people who've closed down. And there are times in one's life when one has to close down just to regroup.
Women stand for the objective world for a man. They stand for the thing that you're not and that's what you always reach for in a song.
If I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often.
I don't really understand that process called reincarnation but if there is such a thing I'd like to come back as my daughter's dog.
I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.
I had the title poet, and maybe I was one for a while. Also, the title singer was kindly accorded me, even though I could barely carry a tune.
My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Fernando Garcia Lorca.
This is the most challenging activity that humans get into, which is love. You know, where we have the sense that we can't live without love. That life has very little meaning without love.
I read with some amusement my reputation as a ladies' man. My friends are amused by that, too, because they know my life.
And I had not much of a voice. I didn't play that great guitar either.
When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.
As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn't understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line.
I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.
And most people have a woman in their heart, most men have a woman in their heart and most women have a man in their heart.
I always felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get a song together.
Success is survival.
