576 Quotes by 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?

I wish I could say everything in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.

Ring the bells that still can ring.

Even without the mushroom cloud still I would have hated Listen I would have done the same things even if there were no death I will not be held like a drunkard under the cold tap of facts I refuse the universal alibi

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.

It's the notion that there is no perfection - that there is a broken world and we live with broken hearts and broken lives but still there is no alibi for anything. On the contrary, you have to stand up and say hallelujah under those circumstances.

I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You abandon your masterpiece and sink into the real masterpiece.

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.

You win a while, and then it’s done - Your little winning streak.