Peter De Vries Quotes (32 Quotes)

There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.

You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. Could you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice.

Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.

Anyone informed that the universe is expanding and contracting in pulsations of eighty billion years has a right to ask, What's in it for me.

The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.

When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.

I wanted to be bored to death, as good a way to go as any.

I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.

Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

The rich aren't like us, they pay less taxes.

Every novel should have a beginning, a muddle, and an end.

The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.

Let us hope, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.

We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly.

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

Or look at it this way. Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad.

Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.

Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.

My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.