1934–2016 · Canadian singer-songwriter, poet and novelist
Leonard Cohen was a novelist and poet before he was a recording artist, and he worked slowly: Anthem, the song on his 1992 album The Future whose refrain pairs a crack in everything with the light that comes through it, took him about a decade to finish. That refrain is the one genuinely authored piece of this internet sentence — the second half. The first half, “We are all broken”, is not his, and the two-part line as it circulates appears nowhere in his work.