No matter how skillful you are, you can't invent a product advantage that doesn't exist. And if you do, and it's just a gimmick, it's going to fall apart anyway.

Properly practiced creativity must result in greater sales more economically achieved. Properly practiced creativity can lift your claims out of the swamp of sameness and make them accepted, believed, persuasive, urgent.

We don't ask research to do what it was never meant to do, and that is to get an idea.

Just because your ad looks good is no insurance that it will get looked at. How many people do you know who are impeccably groomed... but dull?

In this very real world, good doesn't drive out evil. Evil doesn't drive out good. But the energetic displaces the passive.

Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it.

There is no such thing as a good or bad ad in isolation. What is good at one moment is bad at another. Research can trap you into the past.

The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.

Forget words like 'hard sell' and 'soft sell.' That will only confuse you. Just be sure your advertising is saying something with substance, something that will inform and serve the consumer, and be sure you're saying it like it's never been said before.

Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.

Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise... not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message.

No matter how skillful you are, you can't invent a product advantage that doesn't exist. And if you do, and it's just a gimmick, it's going to fall apart anyway.

An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.

It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator's skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen.

In advertising not to be different is virtually suicidal.

You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You've got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don't feel it, nothing will happen.

In communications, familiarity breeds apathy.

Today's smartest advertising style is tomorrow's corn.

Properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten.

I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.

A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad.

If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.

Our job is to bring the dead facts to life.

Word of mouth is the best medium of all.

Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

Because an appeal makes logical sense is no guarantee that it will work.

All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgerize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.

A principle isn't a principle until it costs you something.

We don't ask research to do what it was never meant to do, and that is to get an idea

If you go into an academic institution with a clean slate, you are very likely to come out a liberal. That is a huge problem.

Faith is believing in something you know isn't true.

I'm so unhappy with electoral politics that I switched to sports radio.

What I've learned to do is arrest my addiction - arrest it myself, so I don't get arrested.

I've known elephants with broken hearts, others with depression.

In the theatre, once you've gone about eight rows back, everybody else is just listening to you. You're very small, and nobody can really see what you're doing.

All an actor has is their blind faith that they are who they say they are today, in any scene.

I think I will die laughing.

The trend now is to get away from stage bound sitcoms.

Pretty much anybody who does creative work in China navigates the gray zone. People aren't clear about where the line is any more, beyond which life gets really nasty and you become a dissident without having intended ever to be one.

Looked like she was a cold dish with a man until you got her pants down, then she'd explode.

After only two or three weeks in office, we discovered we had a backlog of 100,000 emails sent to me. We had a backlog of a thousand invitations to speak at places all over the country - and all over the world, for that matter.

The flute of the Pied Piper of Hamelin has never left us and it is essential that we train our ear to detect its false notes because in our case the flute is being played by the rats.

Never do they hurt your feelings or make you feel like you are not good enough, but rather they build you up and show you the things about yourself that make you special and even beautiful.

When someone is bullying you, don't let it get to you. I remember my friends in school, someone said something mean to them, and they really let it get to them. And it really affected them. But I would just say try to ignore it as much as possible and just be yourself.

Through the potent example of his own life, President Obama enabled us to believe the best about America, and, therefore, about ourselves. That uplifting narrative - essentially equating the promise of America with his extraordinary life story - swept candidate Obama into the presidency.

You know, I have some issues. But I just love to play different characters all the time, and I try not to repeat myself too much.

It's always so nerve-wracking being up there on stage. It's even harder playing in your hometown - and I have a couple of home towns - but, you're playing for all the people you knew in high school, so it causes no small degree of panic in my mind.

You open a section of 'The New York Times,' and there's a review or a story on a choreographer or a dancer, and there's an informative, clear image of a dancer. This is, in my view, not an interesting photograph.

Individually we are one drop. Together we are an ocean.