A biography for Leonard Cohenhasn’t been written yet.
“I always considered myself a minor writer. My province is small, and I try to explore it very, very thoroughly.”
“I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability.”
“The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.”
“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.”
“All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels.”
“I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face.”
“It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was areal mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was butone mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed andchanged into itself over and over.”
“I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.”
“I never had the sense that there was an end: that there was a retirement or that there was a jackpot.”
“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.”
“In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.”
“A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.”
“I've got beautiful reviews for all my books, and I'm very well thought of in the tiny circles that know me, but I'm really starving.”
“One of the reasons I'm on tour is to meet people. I consider it a reconnaissance. You know, I consider myself like in a military operation. I don't feel like a citizen.”
“My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico García Lorca.”
“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've always been into self-dramatization. I intend to live forever.”
“Ah, grief makes us precise!”
“Be With Me In The Phases Of My Work Because My Brain Feels Like It Has Been Whipped And I Yearn To Make A Small Perfect Thing Which Will Live In Your Morning Like Curious Static Through A President's Elegy Or A Nude Hunchback Acquiring A Tan On The Crowded Oily Beach.”
“As I approach the end of my life, I have even less and less interest in examining what have got to be very superficial evaluations or opinions about the significance of one's life or one's work. I was never given to it when I was healthy, and I am less given to it now.”