Quotes from Jerry Della Femina

My day is spent hiding from people.

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

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.

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.

With all my outside activities, I have to remind people I am really in advertising.

'Business Week' is guilty of very shoddy reporting.

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

You can't be impatient about growth, because that's what leads people to make mistakes.

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

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.

At one point, I had over 800 employees, and I always paid all health care for my people - including a man who was my assistant who got HIV. I wound up paying his medical bills, which went into the hundreds of thousands. I'm not making myself out to be a saint. I did the right thing.

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

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.

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.

I invented myself.

The fact is, Joe Isuzu is very successful at selling cars.

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

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

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

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

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.

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'm hard-nosed about luck...If you're persistent in trying and doing and working, you almost always make your own fortune.

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.