Christopher Buckley Quotes
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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.'
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Not much ever really comes of commissions, really. The last one that really came up with something truly concrete was the Warren Commission, and for all its good work, most Americans persist in believing that Oswald was working in tandem with the CIA, FBI, Lyndon Johnson, and the John Birch Society.
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Lobbyists didn't descend from a spaceship. They evolved organically from the way we do business.
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I just write what comes along. I don't have a detailed master plan.
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I hope when I'm on my deathbed, people forgive me, because there is a lot to forgive.
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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.
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Writing's all I know. Frankly, I've never been able to do anything else.
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I am not a political thinker. I'm not even much of a thinker. I'm a hack novelist.
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I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son.
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Myself, I'm a post-ideological conservative.
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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.
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I think my identity as a 'conservative' is entirely inherited. People see the name Buckley, and they think 'conservative.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Newt Gingrich has certainly seen his own empire rise - and fall.
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Sometimes when you tell a story, you reach a little bit too far just to make the story a better one.
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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.
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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.
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I am post-Catholic.
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In public relations, you live with the reality that not every disaster can be made to look like a misunderstood triumph.
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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.