Harold Prince went to see it and he wrote me a letter saying don’t be discouraged about this because actually there’s some quite good songs in here. But he also said something which stayed with me all my life, which is that you can’t listen to a musical if you can’t look at it, by which he was actually saying that the designs for Jeeves were absolutely hideous.

It was a very simple thing. It was a church camp, I think. I was there about two or three days, very young, and I just remember some counselor telling us that reputation is what people think you are, and your character is what you are. So if you have a bad reputation, you might as well have a bad character, and it pays to have a good reputation and a good character.

The one thing that I learned from Clint, of the many things I learned from Clint, is to always trust your instinct, and don’t think about it too much.

“What sound does that color make?” Yeah, that was a question of hers in fifth grade. And I was like, “Well, colors don’t have sound.” And eventually, she said, “You know red sounds different than blue.” And I, “Yeah, red sounds angry, blue sounds —” And so she was pushing me into, “Here’s your simile, here’s your metaphor. This is all you’re going to need. Run, my child.”

If I had to make the welfare decision again tomorrow, I’d sign it again tomorrow. We had a 60 percent reduction in the welfare rolls. We had an enormous percentage of poor people move into the workforce, start middle-class lifestyles, and when we had a brief tech recession of six months in 2001, after I left office, people who had moved from welfare to work were less likely to be laid off than the general working population. So I would do it again.

Yeah, there were a lot of brave people who stood up. Then, you know, it cost Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Viola Liuzza and a lot of the others their lives, but they were on the right side of history, and they believed if they made this sacrifice that it would work out. And whenever I get discouraged about everything they stood against rising up again, I realize there just are no public, or permanent, victories. You have to keep fighting for freedom.

Yeah. I’m the luckiest person who ever lived, you know? I worked hard, like a demon. Some would say too hard from time to time, and I over-married, and I had a magnificent child. I have been incredibly fortunate, but I had the American Dream, and it didn’t matter to anybody that nobody in my family had ever been to college.

Well, it wasn’t a game to me. We were taught, interestingly enough, given the current state of political affairs, that you should try not to hate anyone, that hatred was a sickness and a weakness, and that there were very few people who were completely evil, so you should go out of your way to figure out what makes them tick and see if you can find some way to communicate with them. I learned that more with my family — even before I was old enough to know what I was doing —when I was eating meals, my grandmother’s brother and his family had — they had four kids, and they always fed a lot of people, and we ate there a lot, and they would talk about whatever had happened that week. And the kids could talk, but they had to prove they could listen first, so before I could tell a story I had to recount what I had just heard, because if you weren’t listening, nobody wanted to listen to you. And it was like a primer in human nature, and I was fortunate in having people all along the way who tried to help explain other people to me, and I developed an obsessive interest in doing it.

I’m most proud of the fact that we produced broad-based prosperity, where the incomes of the bottom 20% rose more percentage-wise than the incomes of the top 20%, about the same as the incomes of the top 5%. That was across all racial groups, all regional groups, and all income groups, and that we did it while eliminating 600 billion dollars in national debt. And I put America on a path to be debt free so that we’d be able to embrace the challenges of the 21st century, and I think that at a time of yawning inequality, having inclusive prosperity is very important to building support for inclusive societies.

I thought that I had lost for a reason, and I thought that I was a little unseasoned and immature, and I had — the way I made decisions my first term, I got a lot done, but I was better at doing what I wanted to do than listening to other people about what they thought I should be doing or how they thought I ought to be doing it.