Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

Are you pro- or anti-macassar?

— Peter De Vries

People rarely do what they don't want to.

— Peter De Vries

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

— Peter De Vries

Exercise is an unnatural act.

— Peter De Vries

Marriage has driven more than one man to sex.

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car for ever after.

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

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

— 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…

— Peter De Vries

Rather than waste precious time arguing, I went up and started serving my "sentence" without delay. It was usually about an hour…

— Peter De Vries

... it is a fact universally acknowledged that a husband is the most ridiculous thing on earth, except for a bachelor.

— Peter De Vries

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

— 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:…

— Peter De Vries

Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a…

— Peter De Vries

“Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of [parenthood] is not that adults produce…

— 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

I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best -- it's all they'll take, leaving to…

— Peter De Vries

“We live this life by a kind of conspiracy of grace: the common assumption, or pretense, that human existence is 'good' or…

— 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…

— Peter De Vries

"You ought to be ashamed," a woman in an Easter bonnet told Stein. "Your race gave us our religion..." "From ancient polytheism,…

— 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…

— 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…

— Peter De Vries

You don't believe in God," I said to Stein. "God is a word banging around in the human nervous system. He exists…

— 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…

— Peter De Vries

“How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would…

— Peter De Vries

He resented such questions as people do who have thought a great deal about them. The superficial and slipshod have ready answers,…

— Peter De Vries

“I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religious, which is own intelligence must by now have told…

— 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

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

We all learn by experience but some of us have to go to summer school.

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries