The older I get, the surer I am that I'm not running the show.
— Leonard Cohen
I read with some amusement my reputation as a ladies' man. My friends are amused by that, too, because they know my life.
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.
We used to play music for fun. Much more than now. Now nobody picks up a guitar unless they're paid for it.
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.
The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.
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 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.
When things get really bad, just raise your glass and stamp your feet and do a little jig. That's about all you can do.
In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.
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.
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?
Success is survival.
I always considered myself a minor writer. My province is small, and I try to explore it very, very thoroughly.
Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.
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.
Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
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.
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.
I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.
I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.
I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face.
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.
A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.
This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can... reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that's what I mean by 'Hallelujah.'
There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.
