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

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.
Leonard Cohen

In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.
Leonard Cohen

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.
Leonard Cohen

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

Music is the emotional life of most people.
Leonard Cohen

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

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.
Leonard Cohen

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

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

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.
Leonard Cohen

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

I don't really understand that process called reincarnation but if there is such a thing I'd like to come back as my daughter's dog.
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?
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.
Leonard Cohen

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.
Leonard Cohen

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

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.
Leonard Cohen

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

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

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

When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.
Leonard Cohen

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.
Leonard Cohen

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

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

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