From Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (2005):

If it is your destiny to be this laborer called a writer, you know that you’ve got to go to work every day, but you also know that you’re not gonna get it every day. You have to be prepared, but you really don’t command the enterprise.

Sometimes when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, you know, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise — we somehow embrace the notion that this vale of tears, that it’s perfectable — you’re not gonna get it all straight.

I found that things got a lot easier when I no longer expected to win….

You understand that, you abandon your masterpiece, and you sink into the real masterpiece…

And also: “You have to write down what you’re going to abandon.”