Top 60 Christopher Buckley Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Christopher Buckley Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

There was a glamorous Nick-and-Nora element to my paren

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.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
Sometimes when you tell a story, you reach a little bit too far just to make the story a better one.
Christopher Buckley
With real estate, it’s location, location, location. In public speaking, it’s acoustics, acoustics, acoustics.
Christopher Buckley
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.’
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
I had some adventures at the White House, but hardly enough to fill a full memoir.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets.
Christopher Buckley
The thought of Sarah Palin as president gives me acid reflux.
Christopher Buckley
It’s odd to think of yourself as an orphan at 55.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
I just write what comes along. I don’t have a detailed master plan.
Christopher Buckley
I was an only child who had every advantage, every blessing, absolutely.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
It’s always tricky, meeting an author you’ve admired.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
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.’
Christopher Buckley
I certainly wish I were as good-looking as Aaron Eckhart.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
When the going gets tough in Washington, presidents appoint ‘blue ribbon’ commissions.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
You live vicariously through your characters.
Christopher Buckley
Short of taking monastic vows or trekking into the Kala

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.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
I cast my first vote on my father’s lap in 1960, for Richard Nixon, in the voting booth. I was 8.
Christopher Buckley
Newt Gingrich has certainly seen his own empire rise – and fall.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
It’s axiomatic that all husbands are impossible. But I also think it’s axiomatic that women are slightly impossible.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
I live on a train. I know – what a sad thing to admit. I am the New-Age Willy Loman. But there it is.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley’s son.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
Cindy McCain has emerged as a definite hottie. I think that sometimes happens to women in their early fifties.
Christopher Buckley
My instincts are conservative, but my inclinations are also libertarian.
Christopher Buckley
The needs of the nation are not necessarily convergent with the needs of the deadline satirist.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
Writing’s all I know. Frankly, I’ve never been able to do anything else.
Christopher Buckley
I’ve lived in Washington since 1981 and have been a faithful reader of ‘The Washington Post’ ever since.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
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.
Christopher Buckley
Fiction, for me, is sort of a protracted way of saying all the things I wished I said the night before.
Christopher Buckley