I get mad at the New York-based environmentalists because if you were truly environmentalists you wouldn't have a storm surge system and a sanitary system hooked together here that requires you to close your beaches 10 times a year.

Natural gas is the one fuel that we have that's affordable, it's scaleable, it can replace coal over time, it can replace imported oil, can create American jobs.

I can assure you that buying leases for x and selling them for 5x or 10x is a lot more profitable than trying to produce gas at $5 or $6 per million cubic feet.

I just wanted to be a businessman, and to me, the best way to understand business was to be an accountant.

American business would be run better today if there was more alignment between CEOs' interest and the company. For example, would the financial crisis of 2008 have occurred if the CEO of Lehman and Morgan Stanley and Goldman and Citibank had to take a very small percentage of every mortgage-backed security... or every loan they made?

I think most people act in their self-interest.

I've always been comfortable thinking things through and doing it, more or less, my way. You can be as creative as you want, but if you're... unwilling to work on the details, to see those put into action, then creativity is just dreams, or worse, hallucinations.