Quotes by Leonard Cohen
I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.
I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.
My sense of proprietorship has been so weak that actually I didn't pay attention and I lost the copyrights on a lot of the songs.
The older I get, the surer I am that I'm not running the show.
I always considered myself a minor writer. My province is small, and I try to explore it very, very thoroughly.
We used to play music for fun. Much more than now. Now nobody picks up a guitar unless they're paid for it.
Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I've practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity.
I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.
Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity.
A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.
The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.
Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true.
Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act.
There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.
I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.
In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.
Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armor themselves against wonder.
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself.
Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.
I have nothing against the Queen of England. Even in my heart I never resented her for not being Jackie Kennedy. She is, to my mind, a very gallant lady, victimized by whoever it is who designs the tops of her uniforms.
Raise a million filters and the rain will not be clean, until the longing for it be refined in deep confession. And still we hear, If only this nation had a soul, or, Let us change the way we trade, or, Let us be proud of our region.
The ages of seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder.
I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face.
