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" 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.' "

Christopher Buckley

White House

House

Two

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "