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

- Peter De Vries

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

- Peter De Vries

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

- Peter De Vries

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.

- 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

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

- Peter De Vries

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

- Peter De Vries

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

- 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

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

- Peter De Vries

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

- Peter De Vries

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

- Peter De Vries

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

- Peter De Vries

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

- Peter De Vries

Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

- Peter De Vries

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

- Peter De Vries

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

- Peter De Vries

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

- Peter De Vries

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

- Peter De Vries