I have newspapers coming to me and saying, 'Can we get in on the TARP?'.

I would never think of crying about any loss of an office, because that's always a possibility, and if you're professional, then you deal with it professionally.

The Republican Party is the Grand Old Party. It's made enormous contributions to the success of our country. And it is a party that has embraced its leadership role when it has had the majority or the White House.

I would say that one of the things that encouraged me so much when I became elected to the leadership was the letters I received from fathers of daughters, saying that, 'My daughter can now do many more things because of what you did.'

One of my favorite ways to find fictional inspiration, by the way, is to browse historical timelines. I also like world atlases - any country with a squiggly coastline seems to inspire me, as do visual dictionaries, those reclusive creatures of the reference shelf.

Divorce is never a pleasant experience. You look upon it as a failure. But I learned to be a different person once we broke up. Sometimes you learn more from failure than you do from success.

It's always the big question in our lives if you have a lot of success. What do you do with it? Buy more houses, buy more cars, buy more stuff, be wealthy and distant and unengaged? Or do you take all that good fortune that has come towards you and spread the love, do something with it?

Great law schools like Northwestern are here to expand the minds of their students, to allow them to achieve their personal goals, to enable them to contribute, to give back in ways that they could not without the education they receive here, and to help them make the greatest country in the world just a little more accessible, a little fairer.