I was born in segregated Birmingham, Alabama. I didn't have a white classmate till we moved to Denver.

You can never ask others to do something you would not do. That is integrity.

It is possible to work across the aisle in Washington, but it's hard. And I think it's been made worse by the kind of 24-hour news cycle, the fact that everything is on TV before you can work things out quietly. I think it's the intensity of information that makes it feel more difficult to get things done. But I didn't leave with a bitter taste about the politics. The one thing that I would say is, I do think there is an unfortunate tendency to turn political differences, or policy differences, into critiques of one another's character or motives, and that's unfortunate.

Working very closely with the Department of Homeland Security to match up what is available with what is needed.

I don't think that anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile.

I really wish that we had passed a comprehensive immigration bill because that would've really helped our country.

Most days are not overwhelmingly successful in your life. And what really marks whether you're going to be successful is how well you deal with the bad days, not how well you deal with the good ones.