Peter De Vries Quotes

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

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

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.

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

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

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

"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.

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

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.