In my mid-adolescence, my friend Terry Martin and I became obsessed with William F. Buckley. This makes more sense when you realize that we were living in Bible Belt farming country miles from civilization. Buckley seemed impossibly exotic.
I knew Buckley - he was a friend of mine - and Steve Bannon is no William F. Buckley. Buckley marginalized the kooks. Bannon empowered them.
I was obsessed with Jeff Buckley for a while - I was convinced that Jeff Buckley and I were communicating with each other through time.
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.'
Here's one measure of the man and the scope of his achievement: No serious historian will be able to write about 20th-century America without discussing Bill Buckley. Before Buckley, there was no conservative movement. After Buckley, there was Ronald Reagan.
I was very aware of Jeff Buckley. My brother actually bought me The Mamas And The Papas and Jeff Buckley for my birthday when I was in my early teens.
I'm not Gore Vidal or William Buckley.
When Gore Vidal was coming up, there were three major channels, and he could count on a big audience when he debated someone like William F. Buckley on TV.
They don't make people like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley anymore.
The GOP was once the party of William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, and John McCain.
William F. Buckley was a man who had a great capacity for fun and for amusing himself by amazing others.
William F. Buckley, Jr. does not so much speak as exhale, but he exhales polysyllabically, and the results are remarkable.
It's great to be with William Buckley, because you don't have to think. He takes a position and you automatically take the opposite one and you know you're right.
The ur-conservatives of the 1950s - William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and all the rest - were revolting not against a liberal administration but against the moderate conservatism of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
One of my favorite things on YouTube is the famous 1965 debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley at Cambridge University.
I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son.
For decades, conservatives have struggled with containing crackpottery, most notably William F. Buckley's famous excommunication of the John Birch Society in the 1960s.