Jerry Della Femina

Husbands and wives fight, and when the wife is packing up, the husband says, 'Don't leave! I'm gonna change!' Marriages stay together because people promise to change.

Today's merger makers are not ad people; they're building communications companies.

The French are simply incapable of telling the truth.

Kids don't know what life was like without cell phones.

People don't generally like advertising that takes a stand.

In the '50s and '60s, a family's first child went into the priesthood, the second went into the military, and the third child was an idiot and wound up in advertising.

I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and I'm a great believer that you can't have too conservative a President nor too liberal a Supreme Court. So I'm a walking contradiction. I believe that you should try to really protect people's rights in every way, and also, people should be allowed to do what they do.

I think people are getting bored of parties, and hosts are terrified nobody's going to show up. So they have to start entertaining them before the party even starts.

Once you're not No. 1, it doesn't matter where you are.

No one wants to risk a million dollars on a few laughs. The big, flashy commercials are out. The soft sell is out.

There are no client conflicts, only bad explanations.

I honestly believe that advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

If you look at 'Mad Men,' it's set in the wrong decade. The style of Mad Men is really the 1950s, not the 1960s.

As long as the attitude is to only show the sheet metal, then automobile advertising will continue to be wretched.

The whole idea of a spokesman is a joke and a fraud if you drop someone like a hot potato if there's controversy.

I've never met a client who wants to be the worst.

I've seen very few Hispanics and blacks who have been able to work their way into the advertising end of business.

I'm a driver, and I love it.

The Democrats are going the way of Burma Shave and Crisco - products everyone loved and had in their homes. But they got old. They didn't have anything new to say about the product, and after awhile, they died.

Most account guys live with fear in their hearts.

I don't remember most of the '60s and '70s.

There's still a place for someone to come up with a strong headline, some copy in a commercial that's well written. I'm not saying it was better in the old days; it's just a totally different way of communicating.

I gotta be involved. I still write ads; I still run around and rally the creative people.

I ran for political office in the Hamptons once in a war I was having with the village. I came in, there were four people running, and I came in around third. It was over my food market - they arrested me. I just wanted to go for office because I thought it would be an interesting to do.

Sad to say, negative advertising really works.

Pictures bring you inside, whether you see yourself driving a new car or as a hapless prisoner who is being abused.

If they can't suck money out of the Hamptons, a candidate really has to throw in the sponge.

Nobody can write a good 30-second commercial.

Imagine there wasn't photography. Where would we be? How would I remember what I looked like as a kid? It links us all. It keeps us all together; it's what our history is.

In my world - advertising - the Super Bowl is judgment day. If politicians have Election Day and Hollywood has the Oscars, advertising has the Super Bowl.

The bad guys always fight dirty, and the good guys always fight clean.

I always had more women working for me than men.

Life was easy was back in the days before human resource departments controlled business and someone decided we all should be politically correct.

If the FBI is now in charge of bad taste, we're all doomed.

Did I grow up thinking I'd ever be paged at the Beverly Hills Hotel? Did I ever think I'd make so much money writing ads? No.

I'm waiting for the candidate who says, 'I'm keeping things exactly the way they are. I like it this way.'

Humor works, and it's the best way to get attention without spending a lot of money.

I don't like to work for politicians because I hate to work on anything that you can't give back if it doesn't work. I sell products. I do a commercial for, say, Meow Mix, and you don't like it, you get your money back. You can return it. Politicians, you can't return. You're with them for four more years. And that's scary.

In our quest to tweet, like, and trend, we have forgotten that brands can be built through advertising. Ads can generate big ideas that can never be trumped by tactics. That is the magic of an ad, and that is what is missing from many ads today.

I don't want people ever to think I'm not in advertising. It's such a business of enthusiasm that if you're not totally excited about it, you should leave it.

Probably the best advertising jobs of all are done by governments to convince people to go to war.

I was the first advertising person who people could identify with.

There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster.

No kid ever graduated school and said, 'I want to go into advertising.' Advertising is almost everyone's second or third choice.

Let's face it: in advertising, you are paid more, but you die younger. It's not very forgiving. Like sports stars, you're in it during your better years, and then you're out looking for work.

Most of the people in advertising now - mention Bill Bernbach to them, they don't know.

I have very talented art directors in my agency who start out telling me, 'Well, this is what the picture is... ' I ask, 'Well, what's the headline?' and they say, 'We haven't done that yet, but it looks this way.' But I'm still writing copy, almost every day.

Advertising is what I do. It's got me everything I have, and I'm not going to leave it.

It is now possible to target adverts to the right person at the right time in the right place. But that is not enough.

A lot of its readers are of an age where they forget to cancel.

I am a temporary amusement.

Money is being wasted on adverts that go right over a consumer's head. They may win awards at Cannes, but they lose at the cash register.

It goes back to all of us wanting to be in Hollywood. We're all dying to win an Oscar.

Everybody makes a lot of money when the French come to town.

My day is spent hiding from people.

I couldn't get along with the French.

I think it's good to have switched to a much more visual world and that people are not all that interested in words.

I came into advertising in 1961. I had been turned down for jobs on the Ford account in the late Fifties as 'not their type.' If it hadn't been for Bill Bernbach, I would now be sitting in some luncheonette, continuing my life as a messenger.

Every automobile ad looks alike.

If people ever talked the way advertising sounded, they would be put away.

My grandmother would start making her meat sauce at 7 in the morning on Sunday, and within five or six hours, that smell would be all through the house.

The object of advertising is to get people to feel better about the product you're selling.

The Hamptons are filled with people who are winners Monday through Friday.

There's something that goes on in a new-business meeting that's wonderful to watch. It's like showtime. There are people who are nervous, and there are people who are jittery, and there's so much drama and so much at stake.

The establishment can't change. It can't give people anything different; it can't make the turn.

I came from a poor family in Coney Island. I learned to write by reading the 'Post.' This was my education.

Once people feel comfortable with something, they say, 'Let's try it.'

Advertising should always be in good taste without a question.

That's great advertising when you can turn Chicago into a city you'd want to spend more than three hours in.

I came into the advertising business in 1952, at the age of sixteen, as a delivery boy for a stuffy, old-line advertising agency named Ruthruff and Ryan, which could have served as the setting for the 'Mad Men' television series without moving a desk.

Sometimes you have to scare people to save their lives. But I'm very much against it if you're trying to sell a product.

The Google model of targeted advertising is appealing because it claims to cut down on waste. We need to ask how that efficiency can be brought to creative process.

Thank you for making me nouveau riche.

By 1961, when I got my first copywriting job, 'my kind' were suddenly in demand. The creative revolution had begun. Advertising had turned into a business dominated by young, funny, Jewish copywriters and tough, sometimes violent, Greek and Italian art directors.

The Internet is king. Newspapers are dead or dying. Magazines are shrinking every day. Ad budgets are being cut. The bottom line is now the only line in advertising.

Almost everything looks better from a distance, Long Island included.

I once attended an advertising conference held at the Greenbrier Hotel in 1968. The dean of the original Mad Men, the great David Ogilvy, was the keynote speaker. The subject of his speech was the new creative revolution in advertising.

People who are visiting Long Island find it's very beautiful, and they are quick to try Long Island foods, wines and other products.