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.

I love Oscar Wilde, still the wittiest writer of anyone, dead or living.

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.

I'm a Republican, but I find Nancy Pelosi very attractive.

We live - on a spinning planet in a world of spin.

As you know, divorce is still not allowed in the Catholic Church. But here insert a large 'however' - she is liberal in the granting of annulments.

In public relations, you live with the reality that not every disaster can be made to look like a misunderstood triumph.

It's odd to think of yourself as an orphan at 55.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think my identity as a 'conservative' is entirely inherited. People see the name Buckley, and they think 'conservative.'

Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.'

Catch-22's admirers cross boundaries - ideological, generational, geographical.

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

Lobbyists didn't descend from a spaceship. They evolved organically from the way we do business.

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.

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

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

I am not a political thinker. I'm not even much of a thinker. I'm a hack novelist.

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

I am post-Catholic.

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.

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.

It's always tricky, meeting an author you've admired.

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

I want Tom Clancy, the Maryland novelist, to write the story of the rest of my life.

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.'

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.

Mum's serial misbehavior over the years had driven me, despairing, to write her scolding - occasionally scalding letters.

I was an only child who had every advantage, every blessing, absolutely.

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.

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 have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him.

I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets.

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 haven't left the Republican Party. It left me.

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.

Sometimes when you tell a story, you reach a little bit too far just to make the story a better one.

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.

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.