Top 100 Christopher Buckley Quotes
#1. 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
#2. For me, my party views don't advance my narrative. Until I can find a way to write political satire like my idols Christopher Buckley or P.J. O'Rourke, I'll simply say what team I play for and leave it at that.
Jen Lancaster
#3. 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
#4. The best advice on writing I've ever received was from William Zinsser: 'Be grateful for every word you can cut.'
Christopher Buckley
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. In a 24/7 news cycle, with all the shrieking, howling voices and rapid-response and instant spinning and Soviet-style disinformation-mongering, a good idea has a shelf life of about, um, six seconds.
Christopher Buckley
#8. 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
#9. If even a dog's tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power . . . - Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
Christopher Buckley
#10. 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
#11. I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son.
Christopher Buckley
#13. 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.
Christopher Buckley
#14. People believe unbelievable things because it's self-flattering to think that you are intellectually daring enough to accept what others find preposterous.
Christopher Buckley
#15. 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
#16. 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.
Christopher Buckley
#17. I can clear a dinner table in less than 60 seconds, moaning like a dockyard Elijah about the deficit and the inevitable reckoning.
Christopher Buckley
#18. I have been on the receiving end of many blessings in my life, few as great as having known George and Barbara Bush.
Christopher Buckley
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. I hope when I'm on my deathbed, people forgive me, because there is a lot to forgive.
Christopher Buckley
#23. 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
#24. Fiction, for me, is sort of a protracted way of saying all the things I wished I said the night before.
Christopher Buckley
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Once they're both gone, your parents' house instantly turns into a museum.
Christopher Buckley
#28. 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.
Christopher Buckley
#30. You never remember who came to the funeral, but you never forget who didn't.
Christopher Buckley
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. The Republican Party once could lay claim to the mantle of being the fiscally responsible, or 'Daddy,' Party.
Christopher Buckley
#35. 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
#36. 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
#38. With real estate, it's location, location, location. In public speaking, it's acoustics, acoustics, acoustics.
Christopher Buckley
#39. Perhaps, after all, the most beautiful words in the language are I'm sorry.
Christopher Buckley
#40. And each year now
we know more, but we know no better
what we see in the sky is simply
the softened gloss of the past sifting
back to us, and likewise, every atom
down the body's shining length
was inside a star, and will be again.
Christopher Buckley
#41. 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.
Christopher Buckley
#42. My instincts are conservative, but my inclinations are also libertarian.
Christopher Buckley
#43. Women might just have something to contribute to civilization other than their vaginas.
Christopher Buckley
#46. I was an only child who had every advantage, every blessing, absolutely.
Christopher Buckley
#47. I am not a political thinker. I'm not even much of a thinker. I'm a hack novelist.
Christopher Buckley
#48. 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
#50. One night, after imbibing about two acres' worth of vineyard grapes, she
Christopher Buckley
#51. 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.
Christopher Buckley
#52. I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him.
Christopher Buckley
#53. One realization does dawn upon the death of the second parent, namely that you've now moved into the green room to the River Styx. You're next.
Christopher Buckley
#55. 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.
Christopher Buckley
#56. The needs of the nation are not necessarily convergent with the needs of the deadline satirist.
Christopher Buckley
#57. I had some adventures at the White House, but hardly enough to fill a full memoir.
Christopher Buckley
#59. 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
#60. I'll let Democrats defend spending our grandchildren broke on entitlements.
Christopher Buckley
#61. In public relations, you live with the reality that not every disaster can be made to look like a misunderstood triumph.
Christopher Buckley
#62. When the going gets tough in Washington, presidents appoint 'blue ribbon' commissions.
Christopher Buckley
#63. 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
#66. How many times had those awful words - "I know what I'm doing" - been uttered throughout history as prelude to disaster?
Christopher Buckley
#67. Christopher Hitchens is the greatest living essayist in the English language.
Christopher Buckley
#68. 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
#70. 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
#71. My mother spent a month in a Swiss hospital after a terrible ski accident.
Christopher Buckley
#72. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets.
Christopher Buckley
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. I love Oscar Wilde, still the wittiest writer of anyone, dead or living.
Christopher Buckley
#77. 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
#78. I'm not a particularly cerebral writer. I unabashedly go for the belly.
Christopher Buckley
#79. Nothing raises the national temperature more than a VACANCY sign hanging from the colonnaded front of the Supreme Court.
Christopher Buckley
#80. There is no point in arguing if you are not susceptible to reason. Embrace your cynicism. Hug it.
Christopher Buckley
#81. 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
#82. 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.
Christopher Buckley
#83. I want Tom Clancy, the Maryland novelist, to write the story of the rest of my life.
Christopher Buckley
#86. Joe Scarborough was one of 74 Republicans elected to the Congress in 1994 in response to the missteps of the early Clinton era. He was the first Republican elected to Congress from his northern Florida district since the 1870s and handily won re-election three times.
Christopher Buckley
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. I like many different kinds of music. My favourite band is Radiohead, and I'm also a giant Jeff Buckley fan.
Christopher Masterson
#90. That's the beauty of argument, if you argue correctly, you're never wrong.
Christopher Buckley
#92. 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
#93. Sometimes when you tell a story, you reach a little bit too far just to make the story a better one.
Christopher Buckley
#95. 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
#96. Every election, a presidential candidate inevitably proposes a new cabinet agency. The idea is that this is the only way to solve a particular problem. Just create more government.
Christopher Buckley
#97. 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.'
Christopher Buckley
#98. There. But as they were in a public place and as she was dressed like a nun, he refrained. "Come, hurry!" he said
Christopher Buckley
#99. In our corrupt times, the virtue of a Pontiff is commended when he does not surpass the wickedness of other men. - Francesco Guicciardini, History of Italy, 1561
Christopher Buckley
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