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

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

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.

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 am post-Catholic.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship.

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

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.