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Winning the election is a good-news, bad-news kind of thing. Okay, now you're the mayor. The bad news is, now you're the mayor.

To succeed in big-city politics requires a powerful, motivating vision of a better world, a plan to get there, a willingness to meet constituents on their terms, and a tough political skin.

If you think about making a city that is much more porous, many accessible spaces, that is a political position, because you don't fortify, you open it up so that many people can use it.

I'm fed up with democracy. In a democracy, people vote for the mayors. I wanted to build a city where I will choose the citizens.

To finalize, the purpose of an election is to hear the will of the people, not to fabricate votes.

The very fact that I became mayor in 1977 conveys how you can't figure out what the people will do. Nobody thought I would be elected. When I entered I got four percent of the vote in the first poll, four percent.

I have to admit I didn't do as much as I should have back when I was mayor, but now we're getting it done. It's not where you've been but where you're going.

When I said the city would be stronger, I didn't know that. I just hoped it. There are parts of you that say, 'Maybe we're not going to get through this.' You don't listen to them.

The mayoral mentality is incredibly valuable. I don't want to lose that.