Leonard Cohen - Work Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

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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.

Leonard Cohen
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.

Leonard Cohen
Anything, Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, LSD, I'm for anything that works.

Leonard Cohen
I have no idea what I am doing. It's hard to describe. 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.

Leonard Cohen
Ah, you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

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

Leonard Cohen
He hated the men floating in sleep in the big stone houses. Because their lives were ordered and their rooms tidy. Because they got up every morning and did their public work. Because they weren't going to dynamite their factories and have naked parties in the fire.

Leonard Cohen
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.

Leonard Cohen
Then Dylan says to me, 'As far as I'm concerned, Leonard, you're Number 1. I'm Number Zero.' Meaning, as I understood it at the time — and I was not ready to dispute it — that his work was beyond measure and my work was pretty good.

Leonard Cohen
I don't dare attach myself to a spiritual strategy. I don't dare do that. I've got some work to do. Take care of business. I am ready to die. I hope it's not too uncomfortable. That's about it for me.

Leonard Cohen
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

Leonard Cohen