And if I lost I would have gone back to 12 weeks of vacation, because I was successful enough that I was spending much more time on non-profit boards and traveling a lot.

We will see the increasingly rapid rate of growth we've already been seeing in Colorado continue.

For me, the risks in terms of opening that brewpub were fairly high. I put my house up as collateral, I invested the liquid money I had and two years of my time to get it over, but that's really not much of a risk for what the potential reward was if it worked.

I assume we will have figured out a way to efficiently utilize solar energy and tied that to an efficient way to use nuclear energy in such a way that it doesn't pose a serious environmental issue.

Some day, someone will do something wrong and there will be a scandal to report in the paper. When that happens, we will address it honestly and openly and try to deal with it as quickly and as fairly as we can, and keep moving the city forward.

Last, in restaurants you spend a lot of time dealing with people who are very unhappy. Soup has been spilled on their laps, they've waited 10 minutes to get their check so they can leave, and you learn how to listen, I think, in a much more proactive way than government does.

Is there some risk every day we walk out our front door? Every time we get in our car? Yeah. Are we materially less safe now than we were 10 years ago? Whatever delta there is, it's very small.

I would argue that one of the issues which the public should be much more emphatic about with all politicians... is patronage, appointing people to high positions because they supported your campaign or helped you raise money.

America is always attracting people, from all over the earth.

I think we're in good shape, but the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is in some small way mitigated by the fact that we now have more people talking about it, thinking about it and working on it, so that we will be more vigilant and ready.

Given that, and assuming that we begin to adjust to issues like climate change and the greenhouse effect, Denver's location in the center of the country becomes a tremendous advantage.

I would argue that's because we had a bunch of smart people running around here. They were coming in and working very hard and many of them had left jobs in which they made significantly more money.

The most important thing a mayor does is hire talented people to run the city.

Today we're dealing with metropolitan Shanghai, metropolitan New Delhi or Paris. If we're competing at that level, our diversity, that richness of people coming from so many different backgrounds, is one of our greatest advantages.

From my subjective position, there was no honeymoon.

Oftentimes, when constituencies or sectors of opinion are distinct, when they are confronted with a situation where they're going to have to make a serious compromise, they react very negatively publicly, but they also recognize when they step back that this is right.

Especially during the first nine months, there was so much going on with trying to hire 55 people to run the city, it was hard to imagine any honeymoon.

A mayor is a symbol and a public face of what a city bureaucracy provides its citizens.

Denver is a city that will be far more defined by its future than its past.

And if I lost I would have gone back to 12 weeks of vacation, because I was successful enough that I was spending much more time on non-profit boards and traveling a lot.

If it was really successful, it was a life calling, a career I was excited about doing, so I didn't think the overall risk was anywhere near as high as what the reward was.

In the restaurant business, you never want to have enemies, whereas it seems that many politicians judge their success by how high their enemies are and whether they can show that they can hold their ground and give a punch for every punch they take.

The world has become rapidly more competitive.

Of everyone else who was running, and there were some very talented people, none of them had anywhere near the experience I had in hiring people, holding them accountable, creating systems for accountability.

There could have been more planning in New Orleans, but you look at all the devastation that happened there - have we gotten to 3,000 deaths yet? For that magnitude of a disaster, that's not all that bad.

We are, by many measures, one of the more diverse cities in the country, growing more diverse all the time, and one of the more harmonious in terms of how we live together.

You looked at Stanford or Harvard, or the University of Colorado, these were powerful engines just turning out people ready to create and grow businesses.

Colorado has always been a good place to find what youre made of.

Colorado is a state that people like to be themselves and solve their own problems.

Colorado does not shut down. Colorado does not quit. Colorado does not break.

Tough times call for tough choices and pinching every penny.

Any businessman will tell you that transportation is fundamental to success.

I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.

The successful establishment of a buffer zone around Fort Carson will provide an example for other bases around the country as we seek to protect the training mission of the U.S. military while preserving critical habitats on our ranges.

I'll tell you what I did need to learn was tolerance, and I think I've been actually given a daily opportunity to practice that, and it's - it's - and I know that that sounds almost like a backhanded slap, and it is in a way because I haven't been successful at it every day.

I am always successful in my work.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

When I meet successful people I ask 100 questions as to what they attribute their success to. It is usually the same: persistence, hard work and hiring good people.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture.

To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a God.

If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.

The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.

I don't think there has been any increase in sophistication in the audience. When people are aware of a concept that's easy to understand, and there's an actor who will attract them to the theater and it's a movie that's funny three-quarters of the time, it will be successful.

The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn't buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals.

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

I find that the very things that I get criticized for, which is usually being different and just doing my own thing and just being original, is the very thing that's making me successful.