Peter De Vries Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“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 -
“The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“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 -
“I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“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.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“Look at it this way: Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating on one another.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“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 -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“If there's anything I hate it's the word humorist-I feel like countering with the word seriousist.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“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 -
“Man is vile, I know, but people are wonderful.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“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 -
“A politician is a man who can be verbose in fewer words than anyone else.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“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 -
“Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.”
-- Peter De Vries -
“The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.”
-- Peter De Vries