Peter De Vries
Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Marriage
The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly.Collection: Anniversary
Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.Collection: Food
The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.Collection: Humor
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.Collection: Marriage
The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.Collection: Marriage
I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.Collection: Morning
A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.Collection: Car
I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.Collection: Experience
Life is a zoo in a jungle.Collection: Life
We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.
It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.
Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.
The rich aren't like us, they pay less taxes.
Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.
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.
There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.
Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.
We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other.
Let us hope, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
I wanted to be bored to death, as good a way to go as any.
The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums.
The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then pass a law saying, "Thou shalt not kill," is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long.Collection: Loss
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.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Ideas
Marriage has driven more than one man to sex.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Funny Life
"You ought to be ashamed," a woman in an Easter bonnet told Stein. "Your race gave us our religion..." "From ancient polytheism, the belief in lots of gods," the woman continued a little more eruditely, "the Hebrew nation led us on to the idea that there is only one." "Which is just a step from the truth," said Stein.Collection: Easter
We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating on one another.Collection: Brain
Time heals nothing — which should make us the better able to minister.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Riding
We pay for security with boredom, for adventure with bother.Collection: Adventure
There are times when breakfast seems the one thing worth getting up for.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Sex
A politician is a man who can be verbose in fewer words than anyone else.Collection: Men
Look at it this way: Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad.Collection: Looks
How do you expect mankind to be happy in pairs when it is miserable separately?Collection: Pairs
The trouble with treating people as equals is that the first thing you know they may be doing the same thing to you.Collection: People
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.Collection: Eye
I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best -- it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money -- provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.Collection: Inspirational