Quotes by Peter de Vries

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

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

“How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit. Nor do I believe in progr...”

“Stein resented the sedative power of religion, or rather the repose available to those blissfully ignorant that the medicament was a fictitious blank. In this exile from peace of mind to which his ...”

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

“But I made an issue of the precise wording of the vows. I wanted liberalized ones, with no outmoded Pauline nonsense exacting from the bride the promise to 'obey' the groom. Here I put my foot down...”

“Deep down, he's shallow.”

“Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Life is a zoo in a jungle.”

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

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

“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.”

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