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
Catch-22’s admirers cross boundaries – ideological, generational, geographical. – 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
I want Tom Clancy, the Maryland novelist, to write the story of the rest of my life. – Christopher Buckley
With real estate, it’s location, location, location. In public speaking, it’s acoustics, acoustics, acoustics. – Christopher Buckley
It’s axiomatic that all husbands are impossible. But I also think it’s axiomatic that women are slightly impossible. – Christopher Buckley
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. – 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
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
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
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
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
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
I worked at the White House in the early Reagan administration at a time when the deficit rocket really started to take off. – Christopher Buckley
Lobbyists didn’t descend from a spaceship. They evolved organically from the way we do business. – 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
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. – 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
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
Sometimes when you tell a story, you reach a little bit too far just to make the story a better one. – 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
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
