Quotes from Christopher Buckley

The needs of the nation are not necessarily convergent with the needs of the deadline satirist.

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

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.

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.

Cindy McCain has emerged as a definite hottie. I think that sometimes happens to women in their early fifties.

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

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.

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.

Writing's all I know. Frankly, I've never been able to do anything else.

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

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.'

I think I got a lot of my 'funny' DNA from my mother, who had a glorious sense of the ridiculous.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'll let Democrats defend spending our grandchildren broke on entitlements.

It's axiomatic that all husbands are impossible. But I also think it's axiomatic that women are slightly impossible.

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.

The vice-president's tongue is several time zones ahead of his brain.

I have been on the receiving end of many blessings in my life, few as great as having known George and Barbara Bush.

I can clear a dinner table in less than 60 seconds, moaning like a dockyard Elijah about the deficit and the inevitable reckoning.

I hope when I'm on my deathbed, people forgive me, because there is a lot to forgive.

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.