Collected Writings of a Hyperkinetic Wordsmith : BUCKLEY: The Right Word by William F. Buckley Jr.; Selected, assembled and edited by Samuel S. Vaughn; Random House $28, 524 pages

William F. Buckley Jr. is all over the place.

Turn on the TV and he’s there once a week on his program “Firing Line.” Pick up a newspaper and there is his column, three times a week. Go to the newsstand and every two weeks (he says “fortnight”), there’s his National Review. Once a year he goes to Switzerland and writes a novel. He has done books about ocean sailing and books about what it’s like to be rich and go about by limousine.

Over the years the 71-year-old author has cultivated a reputation as a wordsmith. This book is the result. It represents a collection of Buckley on many subjects, but mostly about language, drawn from the torrent of written and spoken language he has produced.

The selection was made by his longtime editor, Samuel S. Vaughn, who provides worshipful commentary.

In much of the writing reproduced here, Buckley comes across as a writer who prefers the swift riposte to the considered thought, who like a water bug darts this way and that way in fits and starts across the surface of the pond.

But every so often another Buckley appears, a writer from whom the vanity has drained, a writer who is respectful and affectionate toward his subjects, a writer who treats his readers not with the usual condescension but with an invitation to partnership in exploring the matter at hand.

There is, for example, a marvelous 1977 interview on “Firing Line” with the late Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Borges, who wrote his poetry solely in Spanish, told Buckley that “I find English a far finer language than Spanish.” Buckley drew him out. “. . . English is both a Germanic and a Latin language, those two registers. For any idea you take, you have two words. The words do not mean exactly the same. For example, if I say ‘regal,’ it’s not exactly the same thing as saying ‘kingly.’ Or if I say ‘fraternal,’ it’s not the same as saying ‘brotherly. . . .’

“Then there is another reason . . . English is the most physical of all languages. You can say, for example, ‘he loomed over.’ You can’t very well say that in Spanish.”

Buckley later wrote of this interview that “English can receive no higher tribute than that it was so loved by such a man, who used it from time to time to tell of his travels, in the world, and in his mind.”

The same warm tone and graceful style appears in Buckley’s eulogies for the dead, and in some of his book reviews, like that of the 1971 Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press) or that of “Henry James: The Collected Travel Writings” (The Library of America). Of the latter, Buckley warmly writes that its two volumes “are for long ocean trips and for monasteries, and for those happy to feel the great velveted halls of another, more deliberative age.”

But this very review is impressively deliberative; it and similar pieces prove that Buckley can be just that. Then why does so much of his work seem so frantic?

For me in this book he answers that question.

“I get bored very easily.

And: “Why do I do so much? I expect that the promptings issue from a subtle dialectical counterpoint. Of what? Well, the call of recta ratio and the fear of boredom. What is recta ratio?

At this point Buckley, who writes as if no one else ever studied Latin or theology, looks down his nose at us, quotes some more common Latin phrases and finally, convolutely, allows as how it means “right reason” or “rightly reasoned.” Then he says again that he gets bored easily.

And: “ ‘Mr. Buckley has written that he gets bored winding his watch.’ ” This is the answer. Buckley’s little motor runs too fast.

Or, as he would say, Mr. Buckley is hyperkinetic.