Quotes from Peter De Vries

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

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

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

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

We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other. It may be the very recognition of all men as our brothers that accounts for the sibling rivalry, and even enmity, we have toward so many of them.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.

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.

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

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

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.

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.

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.

Life is a zoo in a jungle

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

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

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