Leonard Cohen Quotes

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

I write slowly. I actually write quickly, but I throw out so much material.

When it comes to lyrics, I just write down a lot of things, and only a very tiny fraction of it, I think, is any good.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

For me to create an album of 12 songs, I've got to write about 80 songs. Half of those are totally weird and rubbish. But I get to some really good stuff after a while.

I'm not a good writer. It takes me a long time to get there. I write and then rewrite and revise and do it over and over until I'm satisfied.

I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.

I edit as I write. I revise endlessly. I don't go forward until I know that what I've written is as good as I can make it.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

To be honest, I rewrote 'Wicked Nights' a number of times. I just wasn't happy with the end result.

I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way, and you know you're not quite there, and you're redoing it and redoing it, and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard. It's a job of tremendous anxiety for me.

Every time I start a new novel, it seems like an impossible undertaking. If I tried to do too much too quickly, I would get lost and feel overwhelmed. I have to go slow, and give things a chance to take form and grow.

First drafts are never any good - at least, mine aren't.

If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.

Writers need to be tough. This is not for the weak of will. And we have to realize that, yeah, it's never good enough. It's not like fixing a car where it's precise and we know what the end result will be definitively.

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

I deliberate over the lyrics; I really do. I'll come up with one line in a day, and then it might be a couple of days before I come up with the rhyming line. It's never been easy for me.

Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

If you get a sense that your writing isn't quite working, change it. Or cut it out. Don't just tell yourself it'll do, because it won't.

I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, cliched writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments.

I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.

I didn't become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don't just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.

No one writes a great book every time out, or even a good book.

I can't believe there is a poet who hasn't eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It's part of the process of selection.