Zitat des Tages von 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.
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.
Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act.
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.
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.
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.
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
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.
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 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.
Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
I always felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get a song together.
I've always been into self-dramatization. I intend to live forever.
The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.
I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability.
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.
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.
We used to play music for fun. Much more than now. Now nobody picks up a guitar unless they're paid for it.
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.
I was 15 when I first became deeply touched by the rhythm and structure of words.
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.
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.
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.
I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face.
There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.
In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.
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.
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.
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.
Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.
When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.
Success is survival.
The fact that my songs take a long time to write is no guarantee of their excellence.
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.
There's always a group of songs that I'm working at. Some of them are 10 years old, and some of them are just a few weeks old. I'm always trying to adjust these songs to some position where I can bring them to completion.
A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.
