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" There are some people who come to me for some illumination on their problems. I guess they feel I'm writing about some of the things they themselves are going through. But I don't usually have much help to give - there isn't much you can say to someone in the midst of their own crises. "

Leonard Cohen

Problems

Help

You

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Leonard Cohen

Knew

Songs

" 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 read with some amusement my reputation as a ladies' man. My friends are amused by that, too, because they know my life. "

" 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. "

" A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love. "

" Music is the emotional life of most people. "

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

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

" I was 15 when I first became deeply touched by the rhythm and structure of words. "

" 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 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. "

" I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us: you don't write the songs anyhow. So if you're lucky, you can keep the vehicle healthy and responsive over the years. If you're lucky, your own intentions have very little to do with this. "

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

Leonard Cohen

Prayer

Language

" 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. "

" Some people care about their work lasting forever - I have little interest in it. "

" Success is survival. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Leonard Cohen

Know

Got

" I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it. "

" I had a very messianic childhood. "

" I never had the sense that there was an end: that there was a retirement or that there was a jackpot. "

" The fact that my songs take a long time to write is no guarantee of their excellence. "

" All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels. "

" 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. "