Meeting Your Deadline

.

...when a journalist mentioned writing on deadline, he said:

“You’ve got a deadline. Well, I do too: death.”

He smiled. “It tends to insert itself into our considerations.”

And, not to be that forlorn, he added:

“It’s probably not a good idea to do an autopsy on a living thing.”

Leonard Cohen


(Listen to his new album)

P.S.  Just now found this:

To see Cohen play was to gawk at an aging Jew telling you that life was hard and laced with sorrow but that if we love each other and f___ one another and have the mad courage to laugh even when the sun is clearly setting, we’ll be just all right. To borrow a metaphor from a field never too far from Cohen’s heart, theology, Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin, and the rest were all good Christians, and they set themselves up as the redeemers who had to die for the sins of their fans. Cohen was a Jew, and like Jews he believed that salvation was nothing more than a lot of hard work and a small but sustainable reward.

The Jewish messiah, it turned out, was a gaunt poet with a guitar who promised not to whisk us away to some other, better world but to teach us how to come to terms with this one.

 and

Joan Baez was equally baffled. “People say that a song needs to make sense,” she told the filmmaker. “Leonard proves otherwise. It doesn’t necessarily make sense at all, it just comes from so deep inside of him, it somehow touches deep down inside other people. I’m not sure how it works, but I know that it works.”

^