Quotes from Christopher Buckley

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

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.

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

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.

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?

I cast my first vote on my father's lap in 1960, for Richard Nixon, in the voting booth. I was 8.

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.

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.

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

I think that every man is afraid of his wife.

How many times had those awful words - "I know what I'm doing" - been uttered throughout history as prelude to disaster?

That's the beauty of argument, if you argue correctly, you're never wrong.

I've lived in Washington since 1981 and have been a faithful reader of 'The Washington Post' ever since.

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 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.

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

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.

Myself, I'm a post-ideological conservative.

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

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

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.