Top 114 Quotes & Sayings by Christopher Buckley
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Christopher Buckley.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
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.
Catch-22's admirers cross boundaries - ideological, generational, geographical.
You live vicariously through your characters.
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 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.
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 cast my first vote on my father's lap in 1960, for Richard Nixon, in the voting booth. I was 8.
With real estate, it's location, location, location. In public speaking, it's acoustics, acoustics, acoustics.
I haven't left the Republican Party. It left me.
Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship.
It's always tricky, meeting an author you've admired.
It's odd to think of yourself as an orphan at 55.
I was an only child who had every advantage, every blessing, absolutely.
I think I got a lot of my 'funny' DNA from my mother, who had a glorious sense of the ridiculous.
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.
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.
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.
I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets.
The cliche in American politics is that one week is an eternity.
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.
Fiction, for me, is sort of a protracted way of saying all the things I wished I said the night before.
I just write what comes along. I don't have a detailed master plan.
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'll let Democrats defend spending our grandchildren broke on entitlements.
I hope when I'm on my deathbed, people forgive me, because there is a lot to forgive.
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.
I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son.
I had some adventures at the White House, but hardly enough to fill a full memoir.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
My mother spent a month in a Swiss hospital after a terrible ski accident.
I think my identity as a 'conservative' is entirely inherited. People see the name Buckley, and they think 'conservative.'
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.
Writing's all I know. Frankly, I've never been able to do anything else.
I'm not a particularly cerebral writer. I unabashedly go for the belly.
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.
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.'
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.
I want Tom Clancy, the Maryland novelist, to write the story of the rest of my life.
I certainly wish I were as good-looking as Aaron Eckhart.
I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him.
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.
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'm a Republican, but I find Nancy Pelosi very attractive.
Mum's serial misbehavior over the years had driven me, despairing, to write her scolding - occasionally scalding letters.
I am not a political thinker. I'm not even much of a thinker. I'm a hack novelist.
Lobbyists didn't descend from a spaceship. They evolved organically from the way we do business.
It's axiomatic that all husbands are impossible. But I also think it's axiomatic that women are slightly impossible.
We live - on a spinning planet in a world of spin.
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.'
Cindy McCain has emerged as a definite hottie. I think that sometimes happens to women in their early fifties.
I love Oscar Wilde, still the wittiest writer of anyone, dead or living.
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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