Peter De Vries Quotes

#1. 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.

Peter De Vries

#2. 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.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#4. Deep down, he's shallow.

Peter De Vries

#5. 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.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#12. The greatest experience open to man then is the recovery of the commonplace. Coffee in the morning and whiskeys in the evening again without fear. Books to read without that shadow falling across the page.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#18. Marriage has driven more than one man to sex.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#20. The superficial and the 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.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#22. Are you pro- or anti-macassar?

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#24. People rarely do what they don't want to.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#26. Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#28. 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?

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#30. While I was now fairly demoralized, as well as aflame with the prospect of an hour in his daughter's arms, the thought of using his car to debauch his bourgeois paradise was a perfidy at which I drew the line.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#34. 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.

Peter De Vries

#35. 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.

Peter De Vries

#36. 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?

Peter De Vries

#37. 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.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#41. Write drunk; edit sober.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#43. 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.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#46. Exercise is an unnatural act.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#52. 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?

Peter De Vries

#53. So we were back in the Children's Pavilion, and there was again the familiar scene: the mothers with their nearly dead, the false face of mercy, the Slaughter of the Innocents.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#57. Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

Peter De Vries

#58. 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.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#63. 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.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#66. What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#71. Life is a zoo in a jungle

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#73. 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.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#75. Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

Peter De Vries

#76. Rather than waste precious time arguing, I went up and started serving my "sentence" without delay. It was usually about an hour for epigrams; somewhat longer for a paradox.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#79. 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.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries

#82. 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.

Peter De Vries

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

Peter De Vries