Christopher Buckley

“I'd been told, or warned, that when you paint one room, not only will it look nice, but it will also make the room next to it look as if raccoons have been living in it for the past decade.”

“I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son.”

“The Republican Party once could lay claim to the mantle of being the fiscally responsible, or 'Daddy,' Party.”

“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.'”

“I think my identity as a 'conservative' is entirely inherited. People see the name Buckley, and they think 'conservative.'”

“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.”

“Sometimes when you tell a story, you reach a little bit too far just to make the story a better one.”

“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.”

“George H. W. Bush may be a World War II hero and New England Yankee blue blood, but he has the tear ducts of a Sicilian grandmother.”

“I worked at the White House in the early Reagan administration at a time when the deficit rocket really started to take off.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I was an only child with a lot of time to kill. I suspect a lot of writers are only children, or only children become writers because it's a way of being alone.”

“I voted for Barack Obama largely on the basis of his temperament, which I thought superior. He is only 47 years old, but to me seemed older than that: a man of precocious aspect and judgment.”

“President Obama came to office proclaiming that he aims to solve problems, not hand them on to our children. Most presidents say that sort of thing.”

“My mother spent a month in a Swiss hospital after a terrible ski accident.”

“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.”

“Newt Gingrich has certainly seen his own empire rise - and fall.”

“I certainly wish I were as good-looking as Aaron Eckhart.”