Rich, ruthless and famous, my guest is a New York institution, known for the buildings he's built.

Is it the competition that fires you up? Is it the money? What is it that gets you out of bed in the morning? What is it that drives you here?

I really think it's the artistic or the aesthetic. I love building great buildings and the case most of my business is the building of things.

And I get great artistic pride out of a great building like Trump Tower, which is on

57th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York, or Trump International Hotel and Tower, my new building

on Central Park West.

I mean, I get a great sense of artistic enjoyment out of those buildings.

If you don't enjoy what you're doing, it's almost never going to be successful.

Well, I think one thing is perseverance.

I mean, when things were tough at the beginning of the 90s for me and everyone else, the problem with me is I was getting all the publicity.

The Great Depression, you call it. I call it the Great Depression of the early 90s because

we were actually, really in a real estate depression. And it was real estate and retailing

and airlines and various other businesses. They were in a total depression. They weren't

in a recession.

And I survived, and most people didn't survive. I mean, a lot of my friends, a lot of good people and bad people had to go bankrupt.

And you never heard from them again. And you probably never will hear from them again. But, you know, I survived to a point where the company is much bigger now than it ever was and much stronger financially than it ever was. And I wrote a book about it.

But in the early 90s, you faced the possibility of losing everything. In fact, on paper, you had lost pretty much everything.

I had faced the possibility of losing everything. And I went back to work. I focused. I focused my mental energies and all of my

energies. You never thought of giving up. No, I think one of the reasons I really succeeded and bigger than

even in the 80s is the fact that it's a little word called perseverance. I didn't stop.

It's quite a long word, actually. It's a long word, come to think of it. But I didn't stop, and I did persevere.

I went against a lot of odds.

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