Karen Hughes Quotes

Campaigning ain't tough.

You never get to too big to phone bank, that's my opinion.

My kind of work is very intense. The trouble with me is that I completely fling myself into it. I get giddy. I get terrible crushes on jobs.

I've always done party building and party fundraising.

I spent some time in Vegas when I was doing some canvassing for Obama back in 2008.

When you walk into a field office, you have many opportunities. We'll hand you a call sheet. You can make calls. You can knock on doors, and they'll have these stacks there for you. They'll say: 'Harper, you've knocked on 50 doors. That's great. Here's how you compare to the rest of them.' But it's all very offline.

There is nothing harder than working 50 pages a day, working 16 hours a day, trying to be good with only shooting rehearsals.

When you were a volunteer for the Bush-Cheney campaign, you came in the morning; you had a supervisor who gave you a list of calls to make and a time to do it in.

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

I work myself into the ground.

You can't go over every beat, every second, and worry about how you can do it better - it'll eat you alive.

All of a sudden to get all of this attention, and to be away from home and working all the time was hard. I was on planes all the time. I didn't see my friends. I cried a lot. It was quite terrifying.

I've got a really hard election. If you had a really hard election and it was after Labor Day would you go to North Carolina to a bunch of parties and glad-handing or would you stay home and work as hard as you know how to convince Missourians they should rehire you?

I keep waiting for things to get back down to whelming, but they stay at overwhelming.

Every time I'm shooting a movie I want to kill myself. Because I don't see the light in the end of the tunnel.

There are as many jobs for younger Americans as there are for other Americans of every age group in political campaigns. Campaigns are very labor intensive and volunteer dependent.

I always start my campaigns early, and I run hard. Maybe it comes from the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco politics, where it's not even a contact sport - it's a blood sport. This is how I am as a candidate. This is how I run campaigns.

Whenever I'm taking time off, all I'm thinking about is working.

If you're working 12-hour days, then you come home to do three hours' homework, it's quite a lot on your plate.

When you're putting together a campaign for president, like I've been, that entails a lot of time. It's not like I've been at the beach sipping a pina colada.

'Fame' exhausts me.

I'm on the ground, I've been in swing states, I've been talking to the American people, I've been out there speaking on behalf of Obama's record, I've been in the trenches.

I'm such a workaholic.

The constant attention is what is so difficult.

I want to run this party like a campaign—not a bureaucracy.