Peter De Vries Quotes

Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.

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

I am not impressed by big words,' said my uncle, who was always read enough to bandy 'predestination' and 'infralapsarianism.

Man is vile, I know, but people are wonderful.

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

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

We turned on one another deep, drowned gazes, and exchanged a kiss that reduced my bones to rubber and my brain to gruel.

People rarely do what they don't want to.

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

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

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

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

Deep down, he's shallow.

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

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

Mrs Thicknesse and I agreed that a business of his own was probably the only solution for him because he was obviously unemployable.

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

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

Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

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?

Dead drunk and cold-sober, he wandered out into the garden in the cool of the evening, awaiting the coming of the Lord.

What we are assigned to bear is in a sense a measure of our stature.

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.

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

You believe what you must in order to stave off the conviction that it's all a tale told by an idiot

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

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

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

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

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

Marriage has driven more than one man to sex.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

There is a point when life, having showered us with jewels for nothing, begins to exact our life's blood for paste.

Life is a zoo in a jungle

A man has to believe in something, and I believe I'll have another drink.

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

Are you pro- or anti-macassar?

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Exercise is an unnatural act.

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

Write drunk; edit sober.

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.

All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.

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

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

I can still hear my mother wailing over some new kitchen crisis, "Oh God," and my father answering cozily from the silo, "Were you calling me, dear?

Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?

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

I suppose I shall marry eventually One does that, one drifts into stability

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

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