Quotes from Peter De Vries

Before the mind snaps, or the heart breaks, it gather itself like a clock about to strike. It might even be said one pulls himself together to disintegrate.

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.

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

People rarely do what they don't want to.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

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

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

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

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

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.

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

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

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

Are you pro- or anti-macassar?

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

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?

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

We all learn by experience but some of us have to go to summer school.

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

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

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

Marriage is a lottery in which men stake their liberty and women their happiness

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

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