Peter De Vries Quotes

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

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.

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

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.

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

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

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

I made a tentative conclusion. It seemed from all of this that uppermost among human joys is the negative one of restoration: not going to the stars, but learning that one may stay where one is.

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

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.