Christopher Buckley

“I'm not a particularly cerebral writer. I unabashedly go for the belly.”

“I can say this, now that my own beloved and irreplaceable parents are gone: George and Barbara Bush are parents anyone would kill to have.”

“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'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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 am not a political thinker. I'm not even much of a thinker. I'm a hack novelist.”

“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.”

“You live vicariously through your characters.”

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

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

“Fiction, for me, is sort of a protracted way of saying all the things I wished I said the night before.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”