Novelist Peter de Vries like Adlai Stevenson and Mark Twain has suffered from the American assumption that anyone with a sense of humour is not to be taken seriously.

Everyone needs an editor.

A stupid is one who thinks that those in power today had clandestine means of getting there, yet wants to get there without thinking of the clandestine route they would be taking.

How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough!

They who await no gifts from chance have conquered fate.

Success is a process, a quality of mind and way of being, an outgoing affirmation of life.

It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'

I'm celebrating my love for you with a pint of beer and a new tattoo

Perhaps our teachings seem less religious and more technical, like psychology, so they are easier for secular people to use.

The things which cannot be adequately represented by words are more important than those which can.

What is your greatest ambition in life?' 'To become immortal... and then die.

In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.