Peter De Vries

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

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

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