Leonard Cohen

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

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

There were times that I thought I was good looking.

Torah values are the ones that inform my life.

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've always been into self-dramatization. I intend to live forever.

My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico García Lorca.

As we make our way toward the finish line that some of us have already crossed, I never thought I'd get a Grammy Award. In fact, I was always touched by the modesty of their interest.

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.

Don't call yourself a secret unless you mean to keep it.

It’s a pity if someone… has to console himself for the wreck of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart’s ocean, but I am such a one, and there you have it.

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove Dance me to the end of love.

Do not believe the truth. The truth is tiny compared to what you have to do.

I’ve seen the nations rise and fall. I’ve heard their stories, heard them all, but love’s the only engine of survival.

One is distracted by this notion that there is such an thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I'm not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff to come up with my payload

I've seen the future and it's murder.

What a beautiful testament to the creative spirit and its true motives, to creative contribution coming from a place of purpose rather than a hunger for profit.

Maybe there's a god above but the only thing I learned from love was how to shoot at somebody who outdrew you.

Well, you know, there's depression and depression. What I mean by depression in my own case is that depression isn't just the blues. It's not just like I have a hangover in the weekend ... the girl didn't show up or something like that. It isn't that. It's not really depression, it's a kind of mental violence which stops you from functioning properly from one moment to the next. You lose something somewhere and suddenly you're gripped by a kind of angst of the heart and of the spirit.

All men will be sailors then_x000D_ Until the sea shall free them