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
We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other.
I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.
Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.
Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.
Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.
The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly.
Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
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 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.
The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums.
The rich aren't like us, they pay less taxes.
It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.
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.
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.
There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
I wanted to be bored to death, as good a way to go as any.
Life is a zoo in a jungle.
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.
The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.
A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
