Leonard Cohen Quotes

Not gods, nor men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets' being second-rate.

The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.

Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.

But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to stay alive as a writer.

Zombie books were going to be my passion projects, but certainly not pay the bills. I thought I was going to have to get a real job on a sitcom or something, and have my zombie books to remind myself I was still a writer at heart. I never thought I could actually pay my bills and write what I wanted.

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

I have done a lot of things outside of Science Fiction, but there has been an almost disproportionate amount of that genre in my body of work. I don't know what to make of it.

Whenever anyone calls me 'The new J..K. Rowling,' I think, 'What's wrong with the old one?'

The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.

In my opinion, Al Moritz may be the best poet of his generation in Canada.

Theodore Roethke was a poet I was raised with so he has a lot of sentimental value for me.

I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.

There's no demand for a body of work, though writers will be criticized for not having produced one.

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

I see my books as a body of work, in my opinion, of singular importance and deeply disrespected in a way that is savagely unfair.

I know nothing new except that Herr Gellert, the Leipzig poet, is dead, and has written no more poetry since his death.

It is a commonplace to say that novelists should be judged by their work rather than their private lives or their publicly expressed views. And writers, of course, subscribe enthusiastically to this idea.

Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays.

The really good stuff- the 'Hamiltons' - comes out after decades of writing and being committed.

I've got mixed feelings about poetry cause done well poetry is fantastic. But not many people are capable of doing it well. I think you should have some kind of license to perform poetry. A poetic license perhaps.

My books and other works are my legacy, and it's a great comfort to know that mine is a legacy of pleasure for other people.

The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet’s eyes.

I was first published in the newspaper put out by School of The Art Institute of Chicago, where I was a student. I wince to read that story nowadays, but I published it with an odd photo I'd found in a junk shop, and at least I still like the picture. I had a few things in the school paper, and then I got published in a small literary magazine. I hoped I would one day get published in The New Yorker, but I never allowed myself to actually believe it. Getting published is one of those things that feels just as good as you'd hoped it would.

He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.