Top 70 Peter De Vries Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.”

— Peter De Vries

Featured in: Marriage Quotes

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

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

4. “Life is a zoo in a jungle.”

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

6. “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

7. “Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.”

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

9. “I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.”

— Peter De Vries

10. “A suburban mother’s role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.”

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

13. “We are nothing but a string of gut on a stick of bone riding this piece of astral soot for one piteous splinter of eternity.”

— Peter De Vries

14. “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 till the condition clears up.”

— Peter De Vries

15. “A man has to believe in something, and I believe I’ll have another drink.”

— Peter De Vries

16. “Deep down, he’s shallow.”

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

18. “Marriage has driven more than one man to sex.”

— Peter De Vries

19. “I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.”

— Peter De Vries

20. “When I see a paragraph shrinking under my eyes like a strip of bacon in a skillet, I know I’m on the right track.”

— Peter De Vries

21. “The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds – they mature slowly.”

— Peter De Vries

22. “Do you believe in astrology? -I don’t even believe in astronomy.”

— Peter De Vries

23. “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

24. “We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating on one another.”

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

26. “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

27. “Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.”

— Peter De Vries

28. “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

29. “Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.”

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

31. “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

32. “Everybody hates me because I’m so universally liked.”

— Peter De Vries

33. “Man is vile, I know, but people are wonderful.”

— Peter De Vries

34. “There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.”

— Peter De Vries

35. “Before the mind snaps, or the heart breaks, it gather itself like a clock about to strike. It might even be said one pulls himself together to disintegrate.”

— Peter De Vries

36. “Rather than waste precious time arguing, I went up and started serving my “sentence” without delay. It was usually about an hour for epigrams; somewhat longer for a paradox.”

— Peter De Vries

37. “Are you pro- or anti-macassar?”

— Peter De Vries

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

— Peter De Vries

39. “Love’s blindness consists oftener in seeing what is not there than in seeing what is.”

— Peter De Vries

40. “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

41. “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

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

— Peter De Vries

43. “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

44. “If there’s anything I hate it’s the word humorist-I feel like countering with the word seriousist.”

— Peter De Vries

45. “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 Noel Cowardice?”

— Peter De Vries

46. “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

47. “Time heals nothing-which should make us better able to minister.”

— Peter De Vries

48. “What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.”

— Peter De Vries

49. “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

50. “Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.”

— Peter De Vries