Quotes By Leonard Cohen

I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability.

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.

Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.

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.

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.

If I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often.

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.

We used to play music for fun. Much more than now. Now nobody picks up a guitar unless they're paid for it.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.