"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork."
- Peter De Vries
"The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults."
"How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit. Nor do I believe in progress..."
"Stein resented the sedative power of religion, or rather the repose available to those blissfully ignorant that the medicament was a fictitious blank. In this exile from peace of mind to which his rea..."
"Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection."
"But I made an issue of the precise wording of the vows. I wanted liberalized ones, with no outmoded Pauline nonsense exacting from the bride the promise to 'obey' the groom. Here I put my foot down, r..."
"Deep down, he's shallow."
"Nostalgia ain't what it used to be."
"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."
"There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you."