Top 432 Quotes & Sayings by Leonard Cohen - Page 6

I'm writing all the time. And as the songs begin to coalesce, I'm not doing anything else but writing. I wish I were one of those people who wrote songs quickly. But I'm not. So it takes me a great deal of time to find out what the song is.

I'm not a very nostalgic person. I don't really look at the past and summon up regrets, or self-congratulations, it just is not a mechanism that operates very strongly in me. So I neither have regrets nor occasions for self-congratulations.

Anyone who's been a heavy drinker and heavy smoker and has the good future to survive that and give it up knows what a very different kind of daily existence one has. I was smoking a couple of packs of cigarettes a day. And I was drinking heavily on tours.

I've always held the song in high regard because songs have got me through so many sinks of dishes and so many humiliating courting events.

Suffering, violent suffering, seems to be something that corresponds with something that we experience.

But remember when I moved in you And the holy dove was moving too And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.

Just to get serious about this thing, you know. One has to be compassionate. It's true that people are up against things, economically and emotionally.

How bitter were the Prozac pills of the last few hundred mornings

Any of the decisions that I made, if one could actually locate a shape or form, were all within a wall, the landscape of music.

After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.

I have to finish it in order to know whether it deserves to survive.

A community is an alibi for the failure of individual love.

Ah, grief makes us precise!

We all are motivated by deep impulses and deep appetites to serve, even though we may not be able to locate that which we are hoping to serve. So this is just a part of my nature and I think everybody else's nature to offer oneself at the critical moment when the emergency becomes articulate. It's only then that we can locate that willingness to serve.

Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique.

I heard of a man who says words so beautifully that if he only speaks their name women give themselves to him. If I am dumb beside your body while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips it is because I hear a man climb stairs and clear his throat outside our door.

The dreamers ride against the men of action. Oh see the men of action falling back.

This mental space is occupied and everything is mine.

I don't even hate books anymore.

Your servant here, he has been told to say it clear, to say it cold: It's over, it ain't going any further And now the wheels of heaven stop you feel the devil's riding crop Get ready for the future: it is murder

[Patrick Leonard] is such a magnificent composer. I don't think there is anybody working today with those kind of skills that could translate one of my tunes into that really beautiful chamber music.

The moon is swimming naked and the summer night is fragrant with a mighty expectation of relief.

In our rags of light, all dressed to kill.

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.

[Prozac] didn't seem to have any effect whatsoever on my melancholy, my dark vision, and everything else that I'd taken it for.

There's always a nice tune [on radio] - helps you get the dishes done . I like to get the news from time to time - not too often. I don't feel deprived.

I don't have a television set up [in the mountains], of course, but I find I don't miss it at all, or the newspaper. I've sneaked a radio into by cabin, but I find I turn it on very rarely.

Today [people] are ready to take emergency cures, whatever they are, if it's violence, if it's a fascination with serial killing or whatever - the discomfort is so intense. Maybe it's always been like that, certainly it is now.

I'm neither left or right. I'm just staying home tonight, getting lost in that hopeless little screen.

My son and my daughter have both been an incredibly sustaining force, especially through this recent bad patch [of health]. So, I've been blessed and grateful for their company and for their assistance.

I think culture's always been violent, and it is something we find very entertaining. Not only does it reflect our social reality, but it also reflects our psychic reality.

We actually lead very violent, passionate lives and I think that we're hungry for insights into this condition. That's why we get all that stuff on television. It's really where we are, really what we are.

He knew that hair couldn't feel; he kissed her hair.

I've never thought of myself as a religious person.

I don't remember lighting this cigarette and I don't remember if I'm here alone or waiting for someone.

And clenching your fist for the ones like us Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty.

Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm

What a beautiful testament to the creative spirit and its true motives, to creative contribution coming from a place of purpose rather than a hunger for profit.

My heart sings of your longing for me, and my thoughts climb down to marvel at your mercy. I do not fear as you gather up my days. Your name is the sweetness of time, and you carry me close into the night, speaking consolations, drawing down lights from the sky, saying, See how the night has no terrors for one who remembers the name.

[I had a sense of interior panic].Always. I didn't really know what to call it for a long time, but I have a friend in Greece who used that word panic a lot, and I found myself resisting it, until I totally accepted that as a precise description of my interior condition. It was mostly panic from one moment to the next. And nothing much else was going on.

I finally broke into the prison I found my place in the chain Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows

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.

I feel that this is a vocabulary that I grew up with. This biblical landscape is very familiar to me, and it's natural that I use those landmarks as references. Once they were universal references and everybody understood and knew them and located them. That's no longer the case today, but it is still my landscape.

I've seen the future and it's murder.

...a young nurse is standing close behind me wondering whether she is being drawn by my power or her charity.

Seriousness is not Calvinistic, it's not a renunciation, it's the very opposite of that.

Certainly within any decadent period, you would probably find the purest expressions of conviction, and I do not see that in many of the people I know.

It just takes a long time for me [to write a song]. I'm very slow. And it comes, kind of, by dribbles and drops.

Adam [Cohen] is a great singer-songwriter in his own right.

I would like to study Judaism. I feel that my own Jewish education was really quite superficial from a certain point of view. Although I think the values were very clear and were presented very clearly, there's - there were aspects of the whole tradition that were not emphasized. And, you know, I've come to those areas myself as I've grown older. But I would like to go deeper.

It's easy to look down from the summit you've reached, or even the summit I've reached, and talk about the responsibilities of the artist, but most people are just trying to get their foot in the door and make a living.

I am running through a snowfall which is her thighs, he dramatized in purple. Her thighs are filling up the street. Wide as a snowfall, heavy as huge falling Zeppelins, her damp thighs are settling on the sharp roofs and wooden balconies. Weather-vanes press the shape of roosters and sail-boats into the skin. The faces of famous statues are preserved like intaglios.

All the lousy little poets coming around trying to sound like Charles Manson.

Maybe we, the cultural workers , could apply ourselves. We're not going to resolve it in this moment or even in this generation, but perhaps as some kind of agenda we could invite our writers and cultural workers to address the problem a little more responsibly, because people are suffering tremendously from a want of data.

Games are nature's most beautiful creation

Show me slowly what I only know the limits of Dance me to the end of love

I think that any songwriter - and I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us - you don't write the songs anyhow.

If you want a lover I'll do anything you ask. If you want a different kind of love I'll wear a mask. If you want to strike me down in anger here I stand. If you want a partner in life take my hand. I'm your man.

Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone.

It's hard to be serious about so many things. [Look at the whole emphasis] on the charts, if you're a songwriter.