Christopher Buckley Quotes

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.

Joe Scarborough was one of 74 Republicans elected to the Congress in 1994 in response to the missteps of the early Clinton era. He was the first Republican elected to Congress from his northern Florida district since the 1870s and handily won re-election three times.

E-mails are the new herpes: You never get rid of them.

There. But as they were in a public place and as she was dressed like a nun, he refrained. "Come, hurry!" he said

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.

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.

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.

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 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.'

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.

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 nice, but it will also make the room next to it look as if raccoons have been living in it for the past decade.

Necessity is the motherfucker of invention.

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.

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.

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.

If even a dog's tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power . . . - Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

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

Myself, I'm a post-ideological conservative.

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

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

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

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.

One night in Venus, the rest of your life on Mercury.

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.

Who knew, in 2000, that 'compassionate conservatism' meant bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief? Who knew, in 2000, that the only bill the president would veto, six years later, would be one on funding stem-cell research? A more accurate term for Mr. Bush's political philosophy might be incontinent conservatism.

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.'

The needs of the nation are not necessarily convergent with the needs of the deadline satirist.

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

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.

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.

The Republican Party once could lay claim to the mantle of being the fiscally responsible, or 'Daddy,' Party.

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

Try, if you will, to imagine Dwight Eisenhower or JFK or Lyndon Johnson or, for that matter, Ronald Reagan chin-wagging with Jack Paar or Johnny Carson. Richard Nixon did, famously, go on 'Laugh In' in 1968, but as a candidate; and to his credit, he rued the day and hated every second of it.

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.

Newt Gingrich has certainly seen his own empire rise - and fall.

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.

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.

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

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

I've lived in Washington since 1981 and have been a faithful reader of 'The Washington Post' ever since.

Nothing raises the national temperature more than a VACANCY sign hanging from the colonnaded front of the Supreme Court.

When the going gets tough in Washington, presidents appoint 'blue ribbon' commissions.

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

People believe unbelievable things because it's self-flattering to think that you are intellectually daring enough to accept what others find preposterous.

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

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.

There is no point in arguing if you are not susceptible to reason. Embrace your cynicism. Hug it.

You never remember who came to the funeral, but you never forget who didn't.

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 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 live on a train. I know - what a sad thing to admit. I am the New-Age Willy Loman. But there it 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.

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.

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

Who needs evidence when you've got the Internet?

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

That's the beauty of argument, if you argue correctly, you're never wrong.

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

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

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

Justices look solemn in their formal black robes, but every so often they like to have a little fun by taking on a strange case, or overturning a presidential election, that sort of thing.

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

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

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

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.

Between G and H Streets, and bore the characteristic "eagle" watermark. Ryan decided that the eagle

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Christopher Hitchens is the greatest living essayist in the English language.

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.

They embraced and parted. They never saw each other again.

Let's look at this rationally ... We've got a doctor who may kill him, an Attorney General who wants to declare him bananas, and a Defense Secretary who wants me to start World War III ... First, we ruled out starting World War III. We were down to killing the President or having him carted off by the men in white coats ...

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.

The best advice on writing I've ever received was from William Zinsser: 'Be grateful for every word you can cut.'

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.