George Lois

“If you're working, and you're not trying to be great, give up.”

“I had a fistfight with every kid on my block. I got about fifteen broken noses to prove it. Part of it was also because I was always drawing, and I always had an artist portfolio with me. But I was a tough kid. I won their respect.”

“I've done truth to power all my life. It's got me into trouble, but who cares?”

“Great advertising, in and of itself, becomes a benefit of the product.”

“There's no such thing as a cautious creative.”

“People say I'm the original Don Draper. I'm not Don Draper.”

“It's almost as if creativity is dead. The visual power of advertising was everywhere - now it's basically gone.”

“A truly great magazine cover surprises, even shocks, and connects in a nano-second.”

“Truly great images make all the other millions of images you look at unimportant. You gotta look at an image and understand it in a nanosecond.”

“I don't design. I get what I think is a big idea, and I put the idea down. I'm not a designer. I'm a communicator.”

“If you think people are dumb, you'll spend a lifetime doing dumb work.”

“When you create advertising, always start with the words.”

“Nobody should force you to do a bad piece of work in your whole life - no client, no creative director, nobody. The job isn't to please the client; the job is to produce something for the client that makes them incredibly successful.”

“The computer has played a role in destroying creativity with the Photoshop. Everybody thinks they're a designer.”

“All the people who run agencies, all the important people in agencies have taken communication courses, marketing courses, advertising courses, and courses basically teach advertising as a science, and advertising is so far from a science it isn't even funny. Advertising is an art.”

“With the way I worked, a client can give me everything they know about something, and then I go away and come back with advertising that knocks them out of their chair. They finally understand what kind of a company they are.”

“Sometimes all the 'marketing' insight in the world can't move a client, but the creation of a truly great brand name can become a billion-dollar idea!”

“Look at the news stand, you know? I mean, it's a cacophony of famous people or people who want to be famous with blurbs all around it, and it's supposed to be, you know, that's supposed to be creativity in journalism. My God, it's unbelievable. It's shocking.”

“To me, great advertising can make food taste better, can make your car run smoother. It can change your perception of something. Is it wrong to change your perception about something? Of course not. I'm not lying; I'm just saying, 'This one's more fun, this one's more exciting.'”

“The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. And I really believe that. And what I try to teach young people, or anybody in any creative field, is that every idea should seemingly be outrageous.”