Top 80 Quotes & Sayings by Peter De Vries

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

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

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

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

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

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.

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

Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

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

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

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

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Try the Lamentations of Jeremiah. They always pick me up.

Sex in marriage is like medicine. Three times a day for the first week. Then once a day for another week. Then once every three or four days till the condition clears up.

Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.

The writer can only explore the inner space of his characters by perceptively navigating his own.

"You ought to be ashamed," a woman in an Easter bonnet told Stein. "Your race gave us our religion..." "From ancient polytheism, the belief in lots of gods," the woman continued a little more eruditely, "the Hebrew nation led us on to the idea that there is only one." "Which is just a step from the truth," said Stein.

Love's blindness consists oftener in seeing what is not there than in seeing what is.

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

He resented such questions as people do who have thought a great deal about them. The superficial and slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization. The vanity (if not outrage) of trying to cage this dance of atoms in a single definition may give the weariness of age with the cry of youth for answers the appearance of boredom.

Look at it this way: Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad.

I wondered whether any woman could be happy with a man who says 'folderol'.

Time heals nothing — which should make us the better able to minister.

How do you expect mankind to be happy in pairs when it is miserable separately?

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.

We are nothing but a string of gut on a stick of bone riding this piece of astral soot for one piteous splinter of eternity.

The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then pass a law saying, "Thou shalt not kill," is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long.

When I see a paragraph shrinking under my eyes like a strip of bacon in a skillet, I know I'm on the right track.

I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best -- it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money -- provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.

We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating on one another.

Life is a crowded superhighway with bewildering cloverleaf exits on which a man is liable to find himself speeding back in the direction he came.

Marriage has driven more than one man to sex.

I think people love each other a little more than they hate each other ... Love has a slim hold on the human corporation, like fifty-one per cent, but it's enough.

If there's anything I hate it's the word humorist-I feel like countering with the word seriousist.

What baffles me is the comfort people find in the idea that somebody dealt this mess. Blind and meaningless chance seems to me so much more congenial - or at least less horrible. Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair.

We pay for security with boredom, for adventure with bother.

The trouble with treating people as equals is that the first thing you know they may be doing the same thing to you.

This human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.

Do you believe in astrology? -I don't even believe in astronomy.

A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given an A for adultery; today she would rate no better than a C-plus.

There are times when breakfast seems the one thing worth getting up for.

A politician is a man who can be verbose in fewer words than anyone else.