Quotes from Jerry Della Femina

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.

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 have a small vocabulary, which I move around fast.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

'Mad Men' is celebrating a time that no longer exists.

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.

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half. Advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

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

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.

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.

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

Nobody can write a good 30-second commercial.

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

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

What I love about the Don Draper character is that he's so real and filled with all these contradictions.

There's an eternal war between a creative person and the business person.

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

On the weekends, some people garden; I slice salmon.

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.