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

Peter De Vries

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Peter De Vries
Age: 83 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 27
Died: 1993
Died: September 28
Editor
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Writer
Stand
Writing
Work
Love
Paperwork

More quotes by Peter De Vries

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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
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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
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Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.
Peter De Vries
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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
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I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best -- it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money -- provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.
Peter De Vries
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I tried to write worse but it was no good my generalizations came out as before, each more exquisite than the last. I grew discouraged.
Peter De Vries
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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
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My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
Peter De Vries
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Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.
Peter De Vries
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People rarely do what they don't want to.
Peter De Vries
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The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Peter De Vries
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What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
Peter De Vries
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The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.
Peter De Vries
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It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
Peter De Vries
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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
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A politician is a man who can be verbose in fewer words than anyone else.
Peter De Vries
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There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
Peter De Vries
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You ought to be ashamed, a woman in an Easter bonnet told Stein. Your race gave us our religion... From ancient polytheism, the belief in lots of gods, the woman continued a little more eruditely, the Hebrew nation led us on to the idea that there is only one. Which is just a step from the truth, said Stein.
Peter De Vries
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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
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I think people love each other a little more than they hate each other ... Love has a slim hold on the human corporation, like fifty-one per cent, but it's enough.
Peter De Vries