Quotes By 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.

My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Fernando Garcia Lorca.

A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.

There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.

Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act.

I always felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get a song together.

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

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.

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.

I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.

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.

Journalists, especially English journalists, were very cruel to me. They said I only knew three chords when I knew five!

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.

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.

I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face.

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.

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.

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.

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.

Success is survival.

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.

The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.

I always considered myself a minor writer. My province is small, and I try to explore it very, very thoroughly.

And I had not much of a voice. I didn't play that great guitar either.

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.

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.

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.

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 was 15 when I first became deeply touched by the rhythm and structure of words.

I read with some amusement my reputation as a ladies' man. My friends are amused by that, too, because they know my life.