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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The cliche in American politics is that one week is an eternity.

I'm not a particularly cerebral writer. I unabashedly go for the belly.

You live vicariously through your characters.

Fiction, for me, is sort of a protracted way of saying all the things I wished I said the night before.

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.

The thought of Sarah Palin as president gives me acid reflux.

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.

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.

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.

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.