Quotes By Peter De Vries

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

Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

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

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

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

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

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

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

Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

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

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

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

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

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

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

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

The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums.

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