Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/satirist-art-buchwald-passes-away-at-age-81 Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald succumbed to kidney failure at home with his family late Wednesday, but was able to spend his last year enjoying life and writing about his experiences. Here are excerpts from a March 2006 NewsHour interview in which Buchwald discusses his philosophy of life. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. RAY SUAREZ: Last spring, Jeffrey Brown had a chance to talk to the humorist and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist about life, laughs and illness. Here's part of that conversation. JEFFREY BROWN: Through more than five decades, Art Buchwald wrote some 8,000 columns, read by hundreds of thousands of readers, beginning in 1948 in Paris, where he lived and documented the highlife for the European edition of the New York Herald-Tribune, hobnobbed with an array of celebrities and, through humor, explained Americans and the French to one another.Back in Washington, beginning in the '60s, he turned his sharp wit on the foibles of politicians of all stripes. At its height, his column appeared in 550 newspapers worldwide and won Buchwald a Pulitzer Prize for outstanding commentary in 1982.In the '90s, Buchwald published two memoirs, one on his Paris years, another on his early life and the trauma of never knowing his mother, who was institutionalized in a psychiatric facility soon after Buchwald's birth.He and his sisters would grow up in a series of foster homes, before he left high school to join the Marines and serve in the Pacific during World War II.ART BUCHWALD, Humorist and Columnist: I discovered at a very early age, because I was a foster child and everything, that I could make kids laugh, so I got all of my love from the crowds. And I've been doing that all my life.