Christopher Buckley

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“I think I got a lot of my 'funny' DNA from my mother, who had a glorious sense of the ridiculous.”

“I haven't left the Republican Party. It left me.”

“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.”

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

“I'm a Republican, but I find Nancy Pelosi very attractive.”

“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.”

“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.”

“With real estate, it's location, location, location. In public speaking, it's acoustics, acoustics, acoustics.”

“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.”

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

“I can clear a dinner table in less than 60 seconds, moaning like a dockyard Elijah about the deficit and the inevitable reckoning.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him.”

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

“I love Oscar Wilde, still the wittiest writer of anyone, dead or living.”