“A good ad should be like a good sermon: It must not only comfort the afflicted, it also must afflict the comfortable.”

Teenagers travel in droves, packs, swarms. … To the librarian, they’re a gaggle of geese. To the cook, they’re a scourge of locusts. To department stores, they’re a big beautiful exaltation of larks … all lovely and loose and jingly.

Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?

Creativity varies inversely with the number of cooks involved in the broth.

To be a success in advertising you must want to fill other people with a passion for possession.

deferring gratification is a good definition of being civilized.

Sometimes you want to have a very productive Saturday to feel that you are in control of your life, which of course you are not.

Conquered people tend to be witty.

To be witty is not enough. One must possess sufficient wit to avoid having too much of it.

If it were not for the company of fools, a witty man would often be greatly at a loss.

It’s not fundamentally different to any other genre, that action is a particular thing.

I always want the action to be witty. I don’t want it to be merely routine.

Advertising in the final analysis should be news.

Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.