Leonard Cohen Quotes

I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.

With a poem you can say 'I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt.'

A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.

My lyrics are my diary - you're hearing every detail of my life.

My poems are always about my life in one way or another.

I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.

A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.

I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.

You know, I've sung a lot of emotional songs in my life, but when you're writing it yourself, it's very difficult to decide what to reveal.

Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.

Poetry isn't an activity, it's a way life is lived.

poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.

To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals.

Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.

To be a poet is as serious, long-term and natural as the effort to be the best human you can be. To express something well is not a question of having a top-class education and understanding poetic forms: rather, it's a question of paying attention.