George Lois Quotes

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.

If you work with convictions, people have got to listen to you.

Trends can tyrannize; trends are traps. In any creative industry, the fact that others are moving in a certain direction is always proof positive, at least to me, that a new direction is the only direction.

If you don't burn out at the end of each day, you're a bum.

I am in the poison gas business. Advertising should make you choke, make your eyes water, make you feel sick.

Everybody is so busy talking about 'Twittering' and talking about the new technologies and talking about this and that, but they don't talk about creativity.

When I did 'Esquire,' I did a lot of celebrity covers, but the celebrity cover was Hubert Humphrey as a dummy, sitting on Lyndon Johnson's lap and aping his feelings about the war. I did celebrity covers that made a difference in what was going on in American culture.

Never, ever, work for bad people

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

Museums are custodians of epiphanies, and these epiphanies enter the central nervous system and deep recesses of the mind.

You don't create a magazine for your readers. You don't take a poll, you know, like the politicians do, and find out what they're thinking and what they want ... You're supposed to be telling people what the hell you think is exciting and dynamic and thought-provoking, and do it - and do it your way.

Only with absolute fearlessness can we slay the dragons of mediocrity that invade our gardens.

Onwards and upwards, and never give your failures a second thought.

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

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.

When I lecture kids, I say, 'You've got to be ambitious by the advertising - ambitious. You've got to say, 'See, this product? Maybe I can change the world with this product.' They look at me like I'm nuts, but that's what you can do.

Ad agencies do all kinds of market research that ask people what they think they want, and instead, you should be creating things that you want. If you do something and you get it, the rest of the world will get it, too. Trust your own instincts, your own intellect, and your own sense of humor.

Advertising is poison gas. It should bring tears to your eyes, unhinge your nervous system and knock you out.

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.

What Apple did for technology is brilliant, but they didn't do nothin' for our economy.

A cautious creative is an oxymoron.

Nothing comes from nothing. You must continuously feed the inner beast that sparks and inspires.

Follow your bliss. That which you love you must spend your life doing, as passionately and as perfectly as your heart, mind and instincts allow. The sooner you identify that bliss, which surely resides in the soul of most human beings, the greater your chance of a truly successful life. In the act of creativity, being careful guarantees sameness and mediocrity, which means your work will be invisible. Better to be reckless than careful. Better to be bold than safe. Better to have your work seen and remembered, or you've struck out. There is no middle ground.

When I teach classes at the School of Visual Arts,, I'll ask the students, 'How many of you have been to a museum this year?' Nobody raises their hand and I go into a tirade. If you want to do something sharp and innovative, you have to know what went on before.

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.

I may have destroyed world culture, but MTV wouldn't exist today if it wasn't for me.

If a man does not work passionately - even furiously - at being the best in the world at what he does, he fails his talent, his destiny, and his God.

From the time I was three or four years old, I drew all the time. Drew all the time, every second.

My concern has always been with creating images that catch people's eyes, penetrate their minds, warm their hearts and cause them to act.

I look in the mirror, and I work with the brightest person I know.

When you think of a brand, you should immediately understand it from the advertising attitude, from the words and visuals.

If somebody says to you, 'MTV,' you think of Mick Jagger on a phone screaming at that phone: 'I want my MTV.' That, to me, was always the epitome of great advertising.

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

Only mediocre ideas can be tested.

Advertising, an art, is constantly besieged and compromised by logicians and technocrats, the scientists of our profession who wildly miss the main point about everything we do ...

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!

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.'

But I love that feeling of utter depletion: It is an ecstatic sense of having committed myself to the absolute limit. But after recharging at night, I'm ready to go the next morning. Isn't that what life is all about?

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.

To create great work, here's how you must spend your time:
1% Inspiration
9% Perspiration
90% Justification

The accurate measure of a human being is what he or she actually gets done.

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 joy of the creative process, minute by minute, hour after hour, day by day, is the sublime path to true happiness.

Working hard and doing doing great work is as imperative as breathing. Creating great work warms the heart and enriches the soul. Those of us lucky enough to spend our days doing something we love, something we're good at, are rich. If you do not work passionately (even furiously) at being the best in the world at what you do, you fail your talent, your destiny, and your god.

The business world worships mediocrity. Officially we revere free enterprise, initiative and individuality. Unofficially we fear it.

You can't test great advertising. You can only test the mediocre. Not that I don't care about demographics. You have to understand who you're going after.

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