“Many people – and I think I am one of them – are more productive when they’ve had a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I’m far better able to write.”

Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.

The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.

There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers.

Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.

Good copy can’t be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You’ve got to believe in the product.

Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.

Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn’t sell much of anything.

Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.

Many manufacturers secretly question whether advertising really sells their product, but are vaguely afraid that their competitors might steal a march on them if they stopped.

It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially – like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye.

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.

I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination.

You now have to decide what ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the market place.

What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.

Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine.

People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same.

There are more old drunks than there are old doctors.

I drink to the ones that can sit with their souls and not wish for sleep and the nightmares it brings.

I drink to the ones who can sit with their souls and not wish for sleep and the nightmares it brings.

I’m drinking doubles now that you’re running around single again.

The Scriptures are shallow enough for a babe to come and drink without fear of drowning and deep enough for theologians to swim in without ever reaching the bottom.

My doctor tells me I should start slowing it down – but there are more old drunks than there are old doctors so let’s all have another round.

I’m not trying to be a big shot or anything like that, but I get my drinks half price.