America is a place where you can succeed no matter who you are. I am proof of that. But you must work very hard and be willing to endure pain. You must set a goal and win in the marketplace no matter what the air temperature. You must pay the price for success.

I was an advocate of the deregulation movement and I made - along with a lot of other smart people - a fundamental mistake. The financial industry undergirded the entire economy and if it is made riskier by deregulation and collapses in widespread bankruptcies as what happened in 2008, the entire economy freezes because it runs on credit.

And guys, if you exploit a girl, it will come back to get you. That's called 'karma.'

It won't take weeks... Our military machine will crush Iraq in a matter of days and there's no question that it will.

On the foreign policy front, Barack Obama is not a confrontational man. He stayed away from all confrontations, and you can look and see what happened overseas. It's a mess everywhere. So he made major mistakes, major policy mistakes. Those mistakes are not going to be forgiven by history.

I think the secret to success is a short-term outlook. So for example, I'm writing the next Killing book now and I have to just make every chapter compelling, so I can't get too far ahead of it. I just stay in the present and then go over what I have to do.

Many Americans simply don't want the pinheads in Washington or the various state capitals to be telling us how to live. But we are absolutely going in that direction. President Obama is hell-bent on imposing a bureaucracy that levels all playing fields at great expense in coin and in freedom.