Christopher Buckley
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.
I'm a Republican, but I find Nancy Pelosi very attractive.
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.
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.
The cliche in American politics is that one week is an eternity.
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'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.
In public relations, you live with the reality that not every disaster can be made to look like a misunderstood triumph.
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 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.
I can clear a dinner table in less than 60 seconds, moaning like a dockyard Elijah about the deficit and the inevitable reckoning.
I worked at the White House in the early Reagan administration at a time when the deficit rocket really started to take off.
Myself, I'm a post-ideological conservative.
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.
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.
My instincts are conservative, but my inclinations are also libertarian.
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.
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.
I have been on the receiving end of many blessings in my life, few as great as having known George and Barbara Bush.
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.
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 live on a train. I know - what a sad thing to admit. I am the New-Age Willy Loman. But there it is.
American voters tend to make their decisions based on a variety of vectors. Professional political satirists employ rather more scientific criteria. Namely: who will provide us with better material over the next four years?
The needs of the nation are not necessarily convergent with the needs of the deadline satirist.
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.
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.
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.
Newt Gingrich has certainly seen his own empire rise - and fall.
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.
I've lived in Washington since 1981 and have been a faithful reader of 'The Washington Post' ever since.
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.
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.
With real estate, it's location, location, location. In public speaking, it's acoustics, acoustics, acoustics.
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.
The Republican Party once could lay claim to the mantle of being the fiscally responsible, or 'Daddy,' Party.
When the going gets tough in Washington, presidents appoint 'blue ribbon' commissions.
I'll let Democrats defend spending our grandchildren broke on entitlements.
That's the beauty of argument, if you argue correctly, you're never wrong.Collection: Smoking
How many times had those awful words - "I know what I'm doing" - been uttered throughout history as prelude to disaster?Collection: Awful