Peter De Vries Quotes
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?
It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.
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.
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.
A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
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.
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.
We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other.
The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.
Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.
When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.
I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.
There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.
If there's anything I hate it's the word humorist-I feel like countering with the word seriousist.
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
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.
We turned on one another deep, drowned gazes, and exchanged a kiss that reduced my bones to rubber and my brain to gruel.
All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.
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.
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.
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?
We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.
The writer can only explore the inner space of his characters by perceptively navigating his own.
The trouble with treating people as equals is that the first thing you know they may be doing the same thing to you.
I tried to write worse but it was no good; my generalizations came out as before, each more exquisite than the last. I grew discouraged.
