Leonard Cohen Quotes About Writing
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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?
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The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.
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People used to say my music was too difficult or too obscure, and I never set out to be difficult or obscure. I just set out to write what I felt as honestly as I could, and I am delighted when other people feel a part of themselves in the music.
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Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
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The fact that my songs take a long time to write is no guarantee of their excellence.
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It's four in the morning, the end of december I'm writing you now just to see if you're better.
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I think that any songwriter - and I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us - you don't write the songs anyhow.
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I have to finish it in order to know whether it deserves to survive.
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I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability.
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I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work - just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege.
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It just takes a long time for me [to write a song]. I'm very slow. And it comes, kind of, by dribbles and drops.
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I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.
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I'm writing all the time. And as the songs begin to coalesce, I'm not doing anything else but writing. I wish I were one of those people who wrote songs quickly. But I'm not. So it takes me a great deal of time to find out what the song is.
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I'd written a lot of songs with hummingbirds in them. None of them ever came to anything, but I did write a few lines last month. It went like this: 'Listen to the hummingbird whose wings you cannot see. Listen to the hummingbird, don't listen to me'.
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My page was too white My ink was too thin The day wouldn't write What the night pencilled in.
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I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.
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Leonard Cohen
- Born: September 21, 1934
- Died: November 10, 2016
- Occupation: Singer-songwriter
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