When it all comes down to dust I will kill you if I must, I will help — Leonard Cohen

"This is the very contrary of dropping out. Most people cant wait to get home to their house or apartment and shut that door and turn on the TV. To me, thats dropping out."

"I feel that, you know, the enormous luck Ive had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didnt 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."

"Now Ive heard there was a secret chord That David played, and it pleased the Lord But you dont really care for music, do you? It goes like this the fourth, the fifth The minor fall, the major lift The baffled king composing Hallelujah"

"What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love."

"Now, I dont want to give you the impression that Im a great musicologist, but Im a lot better than what I was described as for a long, long time; you know, people said I only knew three chords when I knew five."

"When they lay down beside me I made my confession to them. They touched both my eyes and I touched the dew on their hem. If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn, They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem."