Best Quotes by Peter De Vries (Top 10)
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Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation â the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.
Peter De Vries
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Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.
Peter De Vries
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I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
Peter De Vries
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The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Peter De Vries
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Life is a zoo in a jungle.
Peter De Vries
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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
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Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
Peter De Vries
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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
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It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
Peter De Vries
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The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.
Peter De Vries
More Peter De Vries Quotes
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There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
Peter De Vries
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The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.
Peter De Vries
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A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
Peter De Vries
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The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly.
Peter De Vries
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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.
Peter De Vries
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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
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My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
Peter De Vries
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Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.
Peter De Vries
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We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.
Peter De Vries
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The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.
Peter De Vries
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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
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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
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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
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We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating on one another.
Peter De Vries
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I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.
Peter De Vries
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Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Peter De Vries
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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.
Peter De Vries
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Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.
Peter De Vries
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The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.
Peter De Vries
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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
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The rich aren't like us, they pay less taxes.
Peter De Vries
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We all learn by experience but some of us have to go to summer school.
Peter De Vries
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Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.
Peter De Vries
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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
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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