Quote

People often say 'I live for my art.' Bullshit! If you are given a talent it's to be used. It's not in the private domain.

Rod McKuen

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Rod McKuen
Age: 81 †
Born: 1933
Born: April 29
Died: 2015
Died: January 29
Actor
Composer
Film Score Composer
Poet
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Writer
Oakland
California
Rodney Marvin McKuen
Given
Art
Used
Live
Domain
People
Bullshit
Private
Talent
Often

More quotes by Rod McKuen

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Never fear being alone, because you never are.
Rod McKuen
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Be gentle with me, new love. Treat me tenderly. I need the gentle touch, the soft voice, the candlelight after nine. There's been so many who didn't understand so give me all the love I see in your timid eyes but give it gently Please.
Rod McKuen
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I've been going a long time now along the way I've learned some things. You have to make the good times yourself take the little times and make them into big times and save the times that are all right for the ones that aren't so good.
Rod McKuen
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I cannot speculate on what our cluttered mind will save- sleepy Sundays, or a nosebleed after love. I know only the dying heart needs the nourishment of memory to live beyond too many winters.
Rod McKuen
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It's nice sometimes to open up the heart a little and let some hurt come in. It proves you're still alive.
Rod McKuen
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Unless you call attention to your presence who will know you're there? Even a country has to weave and wave a flag as proof of its existence.
Rod McKuen
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I am not a joiner. Somewhere I once said that people join clubs now for the very reason they once carried them, a need for security. Maybe I'm alone more often than I should be, because I try to find security within myself.
Rod McKuen
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The world needs writers. We will always be necessary. There are few professions that can claim that distinction.
Rod McKuen
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Do not ask the definition of a friend. He/She is that one without whose company death and dying set in earlier and living is made more pleasurable.
Rod McKuen
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People are not born bastards. They have to work at it.
Rod McKuen
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I chose the shadows they did not choose me. I stay here securely not just because I feel plain, but because disappearance is by now the easy way. The habit. The worn path that I can trod knowingly and be assured safe passage home.
Rod McKuen
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Poetry is fact given over to imagery.
Rod McKuen
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We will all wake up semi-angels, If we wake at all.
Rod McKuen
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We come into the world alone. We go away the same. We're meant to spend the interlude between in closeness or so we tell ourselves. But it's a long way from the morning to the evening.
Rod McKuen
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Once I thought ideas were exceptions not the rule. That is not so. Ideas are so plentiful that they ride on air. You have only to reach out and snatch one.
Rod McKuen
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It happens just because we need to want and to be wanted too, when love is here or gone to lie down in the darkness and listen to the warm.
Rod McKuen
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Cats have it all - admiration, an endless sleep, and company only when they want it.
Rod McKuen
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The journey back is always longer than the forward run.
Rod McKuen
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If you love somebody, tell them.
Rod McKuen
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There's no misery in not being loved, only in not loving.
Rod McKuen