Leonard Cohen on fiction

Photo by Andrzej Kielbowicz - Warsaw

LEONARD: "I guess that the source of all suffering is a sense of separation between you and everything else. That separation is always fictitious but that fiction is always very powerful. Sometimes, you kneel before it. It is a fiction, though, and it has to be dissolved like all other fictions. There are all kinds of distances. There's distance which is needed for perspective but there's also a sinister distance in which you feel totally separate from everything around you. That's the same as suffering." 

– Blitz, 1988