President Clinton said in an interview he was still working on healing his relationship with his family and felt he deserved some "private space" in which to atone for his affair with Ms Monica Lewinsky.
"All I can tell you is I'm working on it very hard and I think it's terribly important," he said in an interview on Black Entertainment Television.
"It's more important than anything else in the world to me, but I think the less I say about it the better," he told the cable network.
Mr Clinton acknowledged his affair with the former White House intern on August 17th after denying it since January. He now faces an impeachment inquiry in the US House of Representatives over allegations of perjury and cover-up in connection with the affair.
Mr Clinton said he hoped his situation would reinforce the conviction that "even people in public life deserve some measure of private space within which to have their family lives and to deal with both the joys and trials of their personal lives".
In an earlier interview, with the American Urban Radio network, President Clinton said he had put behind him "all the pain and humiliation and the anger" that followed the intense public reaction to his affair with Ms Lewinsky.
"The thing I want the country to know is that I'm doing my best, my dead-level best, to heal my family as well as my relationship with the American people, my wife and my daughter," he said.
Mr Clinton told Black Entertainment Television that there was "a sort of a permanent political class in Washington that tended to thrive" on personal attacks.
"There is a group in America where the acquisition of political power is more important than the purpose for which it's used," he said. "To me, I never came here to be part of that permanent political class . . . I'm not a Washington person in that sense. I don't expect to be when I'm not President any more."
Mr Clinton said he believed those who hated him were envious.
"I'm not even angry at them any more. I'm just sorry . . . The ones that are consumed with personal animosity toward me or toward Hillary, I think, are just angry because they thought they and their crowd would always be able to drive up to the West Wing to work every day," he said.
Mr Clinton added that there were good people in the Republican Party "who have honest differences of opinion with me, that I can work with".