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Christopher Buckley [1952-0] American

Rank: 102
Novelist, Novel writer

Christopher Taylor Buckley is an American political satirist known for writing God Is My Broker, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, The White House Mess, No Way to Treat a First Lady, Wet Work, Florence of Arabia, Boomsday, Supreme Courtship, Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir and, most recently, The Relic Master: A Novel.

Christmas, Sad

Quote	Tags	Rank
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.		101
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.		102
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.		103
I have been on the receiving end of many blessings in my life, few as great as having known George and Barbara Bush.		104
I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son.		105
Lobbyists didn't descend from a spaceship. They evolved organically from the way we do business.		106
I certainly wish I were as good-looking as Aaron Eckhart.		107
In public relations, you live with the reality that not every disaster can be made to look like a misunderstood triumph.		108
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.		109
I hope when I'm on my deathbed, people forgive me, because there is a lot to forgive.		110
With real estate, it's location, location, location. In public speaking, it's acoustics, acoustics, acoustics.		111
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.		112
I had some adventures at the White House, but hardly enough to fill a full memoir.		113
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.		114
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.		115
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.		116
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.'		117
I love Oscar Wilde, still the wittiest writer of anyone, dead or living.		118
'Catch-22''s admirers cross boundaries - ideological, generational, geographical.		119
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.		120
'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.		121
We live - on a spinning planet in a world of spin.		122
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.		123
I just write what comes along. I don't have a detailed master plan.		124
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.		125
I am not a political thinker. I'm not even much of a thinker. I'm a hack novelist.		126
I cast my first vote on my father's lap in 1960, for Richard Nixon, in the voting booth. I was 8.		201
I am post-Catholic.		202
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.		203
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.		204
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.		205
It's always tricky, meeting an author you've admired.		206
My mother spent a month in a Swiss hospital after a terrible ski accident.		207
I want Tom Clancy, the Maryland novelist, to write the story of the rest of my life.		208
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.'		209
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.		210
Mum's serial misbehavior over the years had driven me, despairing, to write her scolding - occasionally scalding letters.		211
I was an only child who had every advantage, every blessing, absolutely.		212
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.		213
It's odd to think of yourself as an orphan at 55.		214
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.'		215
I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him.		216
I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets.		217
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.		218
Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship.		219
I haven't left the Republican Party. It left me.		220
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.		221
Sometimes when you tell a story, you reach a little bit too far just to make the story a better one.		222
I think my identity as a 'conservative' is entirely inherited. People see the name Buckley, and they think 'conservative.'		223
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.		224
I'm a Republican, but I find Nancy Pelosi very attractive.		225
It's axiomatic that all husbands are impossible. But I also think it's axiomatic that women are slightly impossible.		226
Cindy McCain has emerged as a definite hottie. I think that sometimes happens to women in their early fifties.		301
I think I got a lot of my 'funny' DNA from my mother, who had a glorious sense of the ridiculous.		302
Writing's all I know. Frankly, I've never been able to do anything else.		303
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.		304
The cliche in American politics is that one week is an eternity.		305
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.		306
I'm not a particularly cerebral writer. I unabashedly go for the belly.		307
You live vicariously through your characters.		308
Fiction, for me, is sort of a protracted way of saying all the things I wished I said the night before.		309
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.		310
The thought of Sarah Palin as president gives me acid reflux.		311
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.		312
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.		313
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.		314
I remember standing in the crow's nest as we entered the misty Panama Canal, and the strange sensation as the 4,000-ton ship rose higher and higher inside the lock.		315
I remember dawn coming up over the Strait of Malacca; ragamuffin kids on the dock in Sumatra laughing as they pelted us with bananas; collecting dead flying fish off the deck and bringing them to our sweet, fat, toothless Danish cook to fry up for breakfast.		316
I can clear a dinner table in less than 60 seconds, moaning like a dockyard Elijah about the deficit and the inevitable reckoning.		317
I worked at the White House in the early Reagan administration at a time when the deficit rocket really started to take off.		318
Myself, I'm a post-ideological conservative.		319
In a 24/7 news cycle, with all the shrieking, howling voices and rapid-response and instant spinning and Soviet-style disinformation-mongering, a good idea has a shelf life of about, um, six seconds.		320
I think people assumed because of my last name that I was a real right-winger. And if you cared to look at my writing, you would be hard pressed to deduce that I'm an ideological right-winger.		321
My instincts are conservative, but my inclinations are also libertarian.		322
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.		323
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.	Christmas	324
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.		325
The laws have become so straight-jacketing that presidents and their aides dare not keep journals or diaries, lest they be subpoenaed by avid special prosecutors.		326
My father would have been impressed by Barack Obama's mind and style and grace of manner, as well as by - I'm certain - his abilities as a writer.		401
I live on a train. I know - what a sad thing to admit. I am the New-Age Willy Loman. But there it is.	Sad	402
American voters tend to make their decisions based on a variety of vectors. Professional political satirists employ rather more scientific criteria. Namely: who will provide us with better material over the next four years?		403
The needs of the nation are not necessarily convergent with the needs of the deadline satirist.		404
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.		405
I try to refrain from the alarmist statement, really I do. It's bad for the liver and worries the dog, who has plenty enough to worry about as it is.		406
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.		407
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.		408
Newt Gingrich has certainly seen his own empire rise - and fall.		409
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.		410
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.		411
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.		412
I've lived in Washington since 1981 and have been a faithful reader of 'The Washington Post' ever since.		413
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.		414
I once spoke to 9,000 people, but they managed to fit them all into a structure that resembled a Zeppelin hangar, so it was a contained space in which whatever laughter I generated could ricochet and hang around for a bit, encouraging others to join in.		415
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.		416
The Republican Party once could lay claim to the mantle of being the fiscally responsible, or 'Daddy,' Party.		417
When the going gets tough in Washington, presidents appoint 'blue ribbon' commissions.		418
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.		419
I'll let Democrats defend spending our grandchildren broke on entitlements.		420

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