Christopher Buckley

I haven't left the Republican Party. It left me.

I'd been told, or warned, that when you paint one room, not only will it look ...
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The tradition of putting candles on Christmas trees actually began in Germany. The person who came ...
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I want Tom Clancy, the Maryland novelist, to write the story of the rest of my ...
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I was an only child who had every advantage, every blessing, absolutely.

As for the financial world - I've been working in the Forbes building for eight years. You soak up a little bit of ambient stuff about all this - I know what a gold straddle is, what the Lombard rate is.

A new idea is like carbonated liquid in a bottle. You just sort of shake it until the cork pops, then you write and write.

Catch-22's first readers were largely of the generation that went through World War II. For them, it provided a startlingly fresh take, a much-needed, much-delayed laugh at the terror and madness they endured.

Catch-22's admirers cross boundaries - ideological, generational, geographical.

At the senior prom for my Catholic boarding school, I was feeling manly, so I shaved, even though I didn't need to. Being inexperienced, I managed to slice a quarter-inch gash into my lower chin a half hour before I picked up my date.

Fiction, for me, is sort of a protracted way of saying all the things I wished I said the night before.

Coming to terms with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee is like being told you have Stage 1 or Stage 2 cancer. You know you'll probably survive, but one way or the other, there's going to be a lot of throwing up.

Cindy McCain has emerged as a definite hottie. I think that sometimes happens to women in their early fifties.

Her parents, Austin Taylor and Kathleen Taylor, were big deals in Vancouver - they were civic leaders, and he raced horses in the Kentucky Derby - and my mother grew up a debutante. And when she and my dad were married, there were about a thousand guests at that reception.

George H. W. Bush may be a World War II hero and New England Yankee blue blood, but he has the tear ducts of a Sicilian grandmother.

I am not a political thinker. I'm not even much of a thinker. I'm a hack novelist.

I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets.

How many Republicans does it take to change a light bulb? Three. One to mix the martinis, one to change the light bulb, and one to reminisce about how good the old one was.

I can clear a dinner table in less than 60 seconds, moaning like a dockyard Elijah about the deficit and the inevitable reckoning.

I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P. J. O'Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

I am post-Catholic.

I certainly wish I were as good-looking as Aaron Eckhart.

I cast my first vote on my father's lap in 1960, for Richard Nixon, in the voting booth. I was 8.

I can say this, now that my own beloved and irreplaceable parents are gone: George and Barbara Bush are parents anyone would kill to have.

I had some adventures at the White House, but hardly enough to fill a full memoir.

I don't think I ever once heard Mum utter a religious or spiritual sentiment, a considerable feat considering that she was married for 57 years to one of the most prominent Catholics in the country.

I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him.

I have been on the receiving end of many blessings in my life, few as great as having known George and Barbara Bush.

I had worked for George Bush as a speechwriter, and I read a lot of White House memoirs. They all have two themes: 'It Wasn't My Fault' and 'It Would Have Been Much Worse if I Hadn't Been There.'

I hope when I'm on my deathbed, people forgive me, because there is a lot to forgive.

I haven't left the Republican Party. It left me.

I just write what comes along. I don't have a detailed master plan.

I remember dawn coming up over the Strait of Malacca, ragamuffin kids on the dock in Sumatra laughing as they pelted us with bananas, collecting dead flying fish off the deck and bringing them to our sweet, fat, toothless Danish cook to fry up for breakfast.

I love Washington. I have an affection for the place. For a satirist, I think it's sort of Disneyland. I mean, you know, there's always some inspiration in the morning's headlines.

I love Oscar Wilde, still the wittiest writer of anyone, dead or living.

I think I got a lot of my 'funny' DNA from my mother, who had a glorious sense of the ridiculous.

I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son.

I remember standing in the crow's nest as we entered the misty Panama Canal, and the strange sensation as the 4,000-ton ship rose higher and higher inside the lock.

I try to refrain from the alarmist statement, really I do. It's bad for the liver and worries the dog, who has plenty enough to worry about as it is.

I think people assumed because of my last name that I was a real right-winger. And if you cared to look at my writing, you would be hard pressed to deduce that I'm an ideological right-winger.

I think my identity as a 'conservative' is entirely inherited. People see the name Buckley, and they think 'conservative.'

I was an only child with a lot of time to kill. I suspect a lot of writers are only children, or only children become writers because it's a way of being alone.

I was an only child who had every advantage, every blessing, absolutely.

I want Tom Clancy, the Maryland novelist, to write the story of the rest of my life.

I'd been told, or warned, that when you paint one room, not only will it look nice, but it will also make the room next to it look as if raccoons have been living in it for the past decade.

I worked at the White House in the early Reagan administration at a time when the deficit rocket really started to take off.

I'd worked at the White House for two years, and I'd read a bunch of White House memoirs because everybody who works at the White House, even for five minutes, writes a memoir usually not less than 600 pages long - and never without the word 'power' in the title.

If the question is, 'Do I wish I made thirty million dollars a year,' the answer is, 'You bet.' If the question is, 'Do I wish I could write like Tom Clancy,' the answer must remain, 'No.'

If I were to win the Nobel Prize in Literature - which I think it's fairly safe to say is not going to happen - I would still expect the headline on my obituary to read: 'Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, Jr., is dead at 78.'

I'm accused of, and perhaps rightly so, of not being mean enough. I've been taken to task in many a book review, a good satirist has to, you know, has to kill.

I'm a Republican, but I find Nancy Pelosi very attractive.

If you're a speech writer for a president, you don't really see all that much of him because there's so many layers between you and him. But with a vice president, it's different.

In public relations, you live with the reality that not every disaster can be made to look like a misunderstood triumph.

In a 24/7 news cycle, with all the shrieking, howling voices and rapid-response and instant spinning and Soviet-style disinformation-mongering, a good idea has a shelf life of about, um, six seconds.

I'm not a particularly cerebral writer. I unabashedly go for the belly.

It's axiomatic that all husbands are impossible. But I also think it's axiomatic that women are slightly impossible.

It's always tricky, meeting an author you've admired.

It was a mistake to think that my views would have been taken on their own terms. It was a mistake to think that my last name wouldn't be a factor.

Mum's serial misbehavior over the years had driven me, despairing, to write her scolding - occasionally scalding letters.

Lobbyists didn't descend from a spaceship. They evolved organically from the way we do business.

It's odd to think of yourself as an orphan at 55.

My instincts are conservative, but my inclinations are also libertarian.

My dad's one true quest in life was for the Platonic ideal of peanut butter. And I remember one day he announced, with a look of utter transfiguration on his face, that he had found paradise on Earth in a jar with a yellow cap. And it was called Red Wing.

Myself, I'm a post-ideological conservative.

My wife and I spent the winter in Worcestershire. This allowed me to tell everyone back home in the States, 'We are wintering in Worcestershire.' This may be a sentence that has never actually been uttered in human history, even by people who spend all their winters in Worcestershire.

My mother spent a month in a Swiss hospital after a terrible ski accident.

Short of taking monastic vows or trekking into the Kalahari, a freighter passage might just offer what our relentlessly connected age has made difficult, if not impossible: splendid isolation.

Pop was a devout Roman Catholic, I'm a lapsed Catholic. I'm not the village atheist, but I exert my right not to believe, and I doubt I would have been very public about that were he still alive, simply just so as not to hurt his feelings.

Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship.

The first novel I wrote, 'The White House Mess,' was a comic novel. It came out in 1986. It was a parody in the form of a White House memoir.

The cliche in American politics is that one week is an eternity.

Sometimes when you tell a story, you reach a little bit too far just to make the story a better one.

The tradition of putting candles on Christmas trees actually began in Germany. The person who came up with the idea is thought to have been Martin Luther, father of the Reformation.

The thought of Sarah Palin as president gives me acid reflux.

The ideological distance between Jim Webb and Bertrand Russell can be measured in light years. An author who reaches both of them exerts something like universal appeal.

We make our public servants jump through quite a few hoops, you know. We get hysterical if they accept a $50 lunch from a lobbyist. We get hysterical if they accept a ride on some corporate jet.

We live - on a spinning planet in a world of spin.

There was a glamorous Nick-and-Nora element to my parents. If you remove one from the other, you're left with neither. But parents are parents.

Whatever you thought of his politics, Ronald Reagan was a great man, a courageous man. He took an assassin's bullet and joked to the doctors as they desperately worked to save his life.

With real estate, it's location, location, location. In public speaking, it's acoustics, acoustics, acoustics.

You live vicariously through your characters.

You can't tell what's aboard a container ship. We carried every kind of cargo, all of it on view: a police car, penicillin, Johnnie Walker Red, toilets, handguns, lumber, Ping-Pong balls, and IBM data cards.

Writing's all I know. Frankly, I've never been able to do anything else.