Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think my identity as a 'conservative' is entirely inherited. People see the name Buckley, and they think 'conservative.'
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.
I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son.
I worked at the White House in the early Reagan administration at a time when the deficit rocket really started to take off.
I can clear a dinner table in less than 60 seconds, moaning like a dockyard Elijah about the deficit and the inevitable reckoning.
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 a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets.
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.
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.
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.
One realization does dawn upon the death of the second parent, namely that you've now moved into the green room to the River Styx. You're next.
My father would have been impressed by Barack Obama's mind and style and grace of manner, as well as by - I'm certain - his abilities as a writer.
As you know, divorce is still not allowed in the Catholic Church. But here insert a large 'however' - she is liberal in the granting of annulments.
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.
President Obama came to office proclaiming that he aims to solve problems, not hand them on to our children. Most presidents say that sort of thing.
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'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 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.
The laws have become so straight-jacketing that presidents and their aides dare not keep journals or diaries, lest they be subpoenaed by avid special prosecutors.
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 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.
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.
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'm a Republican, but I find Nancy Pelosi very attractive. She hasn't done a single thing as congressman or Speaker of the House that has turned me on, but I find her quite okay.
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.
Every election, a presidential candidate inevitably proposes a new cabinet agency. The idea is that this is the only way to solve a particular problem. Just create more government.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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 voted for Barack Obama largely on the basis of his temperament, which I thought superior. He is only 47 years old, but to me seemed older than that: a man of precocious aspect and judgment.
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.
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.
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.
Really, what's not to love in John McCain, satire-wise? As if he had not already been good enough to us, then came his nomination of Sarah Palin. Here, truly, was a gift from the gods of satire.
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 grew up in the GOP sandbox. My dad took me, age 7, to meet Herbert Hoover, in his apartment at the Waldorf Towers. He gave me a silver dollar. Being a young Republican, I spent it on comic books.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
American voters tend to make their decisions based on a variety of vectors. Professional political satirists employ rather more scientific criteria. Namely: who will provide us with better material over the next four years?
And each year now we know more, but we know no better — what we see in the sky is simply the softened gloss of the past sifting back to us, and likewise, every atom down the body’s shining length was inside a star, and will be again.
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.
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.
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 once spoke to 9,000 people, but they managed to fit them all into a structure that resembled a Zeppelin hangar, so it was a contained space in which whatever laughter I generated could ricochet and hang around for a bit, encouraging others to join in.