Rod McKuen Quotations

Cats have it all - admiration, an endless sleep, and company only when they want it.

We need sex education in schools, but we need it at home first. We need parents to learn the names of the teachers who are teaching their children. We need families to question day-care centers, to question other children and their own as to what goes on.

I can't understand people who give up and commit suicide. If I have a bad day, I figure tomorrow will be better. And even if it isn't, at least it isn't any worse.

The gifts that one receives for giving are so immeasurable that it is almost an injustice to accept them.

You know, in a way, I wish I could hate a little more. It would make me a more rounded personality.

It seems to me that it's every man's obligation to make what contribution he can. You live each day as best you can. That, to me, is what makes life interesting.

I am not convinced the truth can make men free, but I believe it a beginning.

I felt that some of my work was OK. If I could do it over, I'd do better.

I try not to put messages in my songs. My only message is man's communication with his fellow man. I want to narrow the gap of strangeness and alienation.

For many people, I was a phase, a part of the period of growing up. People ask me why I connected. It was presumptuous of me to say, but I'm Everyman. The difference is I put my thoughts into words.

I was tired. I peaked. I left when I was on top. One year, I did 280 concerts.

Loving is the only sure road out of darkness, the only serum known that cures self-centeredness

Love is a sweet thing caught a momentand held in a golden eye.

People ask me why I connected. It was presumptuous of me to say, but I'm Everyman. The difference is I put my thoughts into words.

To understand others you should get behind their eyes and walk down their spines.

Watch the indolent butterfly playing on the tall flower in the yard and think about the sun going down. It always does you know.

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.

Laws and machines are shaped to fit the classes.

We will all wake up semi-angels, If we wake at all.

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.

I have never known a cat that couldn't quiet me down just by walking slowly past my chair.

Never fear being alone, because you never are.

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.

and if the world breaks down, I'll be around.

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.

The world needs writers. We will always be necessary. There are few professions that can claim that distinction.

Everybody has the answers or they'll make them up for you. Just once I'd like to hear a brand-new question.

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.

The journey back is always longer than the forward run.

If I could do it over, I'd do better.

Poetry is fact given over to imagery.

There is no other way to find ourselves but in each others faces.

It's nice sometimes to open up the heart a little and let some hurt come in. It proves you're still alive.

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.

People are not born bastards. They have to work at it.

A poet can't afford to be aloof. The tools of his trade are the people he bumps up against.

Even when you feel you've reached the end or edge of life, hold on. Life itself will ultimately take care of you.

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.

I've come to terms with it, it knows I know.

If you love somebody, tell them.

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.

No map to help us find the tranquil flat lands, clearings calm, fields without mean fences. Rolling down the other side of life our compass is the sureness of ourselves. Time may make us rugged, ragged round the edges, but know and understand that love is still the safest place to land.

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.

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.

There's no misery in not being loved, only in not loving.

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.

May your hand be full for always if only with another hand. May your heart be empty only long enough to give you cause to fill it up again with love. May your soul be lost by you only to be found by God.

Extending your hand is extending yourself.

Strangers are just friends waiting to happen