PETER DE VRIES

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

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.

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

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

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.

Let us hope, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.

The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.

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.

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

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

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.

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

Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

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

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

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

We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other.

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

The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly.

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

When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.