Peter De Vries Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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 you.

Peter De Vries
Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

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

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 about as much as Santa Claus." "Santa Claus has had a tremendous influence, exist or not." "For children." "Lots of saints have died for God with a courage that's hardly childish." "That's part of the horror. It's all a fantasy. It's all for nothing."

Peter De Vries
The entire universe is like a lyre tuned by some excellent artificer, whose strings are separate species of the universal whole.

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, 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.

Peter De Vries
The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments—the very lower bowel of music.

Peter De Vries
For the whole thing about matrimony is this: We fall in love with a personality, but we must live with a character.

Peter De Vries
How do you expect mankind to be happy in pairs when it is miserable separately?

Peter De Vries
There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.

Peter De Vries
Comedy deals with that portion of our suffering that is exempt from tragedy.

Peter De Vries
Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?

Peter De Vries
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 until the condition clears up.

Peter De Vries
One dreams of the goddess Fame and winds up with the bitch Publicity.

Peter De Vries
Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.

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
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 Noël Cowardice?

Peter De Vries
We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.

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

Peter De Vries