Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
Leonard Cohen
This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can... reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that's what I mean by 'Hallelujah.'
Leonard Cohen
My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke. It caused me to laugh bitterly through the 10,000 nights I spent alone.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
At a certain point, if you still have your marbles and are not faced with serious financial challenges, you have a chance to put your house in order. It's a cliche, but it's underestimated as an analgesic on all levels. Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable.
Leonard Cohen
I've never sold widely enough to be able to relax about money. I had two kids and their mother to support and my own life. So there was never an option of cutting out.
Leonard Cohen
I like life on the road. It's a lot easier than civilian life. You kind of feel like you're in a motorcycle gang.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.
Leonard Cohen
I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face.
Leonard Cohen
When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.
Leonard Cohen
A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
I can make a couple of good sandwiches: tuna salad and chopped egg salad. And Greek bean soup. I was a cook for my old Zen master for many years. So there were two or three dishes that he liked, you know. Teriyaki salmon, a few things.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
I never had the sense that there was an end: that there was a retirement or that there was a jackpot.
Leonard Cohen
I don't have any sense or urgency about any of my writing, actually. I don't think mankind will be damaged if I don't put out a new album or a new book.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
As I approach the end of my life, I have even less and less interest in examining what have got to be very superficial evaluations or opinions about the significance of one's life or one's work. I was never given to it when I was healthy, and I am less given to it now.
Leonard Cohen
There are writers who are great visionaries, who can depict huge movements - things like that. They're the great writers. I'm just the other kind.
Leonard Cohen
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?
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
I continually blacken pages and scribble away, so I always have a number of songs that are half-finished.
Leonard Cohen
The basic function of popular music is to create an environment for courting, lovemaking, and doing the dishes. It's useful because it addresses the heart in the midst of all these activities, and it will always be useful in this very important way.
Leonard Cohen
My mind was always very cluttered, so I took great pains to simplify my environment, because if my environment were half as cluttered as my mind, I wouldn't be able to make it from room to room.
Leonard Cohen
I never had huge amounts of money when I was young. I had huge amounts of fame, and I always had the sense of labor and recompense. I always said I don't want to work for pay, but I want to get paid for my song.
Leonard Cohen
As we make our way toward the finish line that some of us have already crossed, I never thought I'd get a Grammy Award. In fact, I was always touched by the modesty of their interest.
Leonard Cohen
Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.
Leonard Cohen
I have a deep tribal sense. I grew up in a synagogue that my ancestors built. I sat in the third row. My family was decent. They were good people; they were handshake people. So I never had a sense of rebellion.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Leonard Cohen
I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.
Leonard Cohen