We live - on a spinning planet in a world of spin.
Christopher Buckley
It's odd to think of yourself as an orphan at 55.
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.
In public relations, you live with the reality that not every disaster can be made to look like a misunderstood triumph.
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.
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.
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 hope when I'm on my deathbed, people forgive me, because there is a lot to forgive.
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.
The Republican Party once could lay claim to the mantle of being the fiscally responsible, or 'Daddy,' Party.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With real estate, it's location, location, location. In public speaking, it's acoustics, acoustics, acoustics.
Catch-22's admirers cross boundaries - ideological, generational, geographical.
The cliche in American politics is that one week is an eternity.
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 spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son.
The thought of Sarah Palin as president gives me acid reflux.
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.
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.
I was an only child who had every advantage, every blessing, absolutely.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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 certainly wish I were as good-looking as Aaron Eckhart.
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.
I had some adventures at the White House, but hardly enough to fill a full memoir.
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.
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 love Oscar Wilde, still the wittiest writer of anyone, dead or living.
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.
Lobbyists didn't descend from a spaceship. They evolved organically from the way we do business.
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.
I just write what comes along. I don't have a detailed master plan.
I am not a political thinker. I'm not even much of a thinker. I'm a hack novelist.
I cast my first vote on my father's lap in 1960, for Richard Nixon, in the voting booth. I was 8.
I am post-Catholic.
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 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 always tricky, meeting an author you've admired.
My mother spent a month in a Swiss hospital after a terrible ski accident.
I want Tom Clancy, the Maryland novelist, to write the story of the rest of my life.
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.
Mum's serial misbehavior over the years had driven me, despairing, to write her scolding - occasionally scalding letters.
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.
