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

You live vicariously through your characters.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.'

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.

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

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

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.

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