For me, the magazine was always the heart of what my life was all about, and the other half was living the life.
Since time immemorial, youth has set the universal standard of physical beauty, and the reason is simply that a shapely firm young face and body are more attractive sexually and aesthetically than bulges, sags and wrinkles.
One of the sad things, I think, about the younger generation, quite frankly, is they have less sense of yesterday. And if you don’t know who you were, you don’t really know who you are.
For some people, there is no succession plan. They just leave, and there’s no getting over it.
The Puritans thought they could simply repress man’s sexual nature, and they reaped a whirlwind as a result. Their code of sexual morality – which became America’s – was nothing more than a set of rules laid down by people who believed that all pleasure was suspect.
They must be doing something right up there in Canada.
I was a very idealistic, very romantic kid in a very typically Midwestern Methodist repressed home. There was no show of affection of any kind, and I escaped to dreams and fantasies produced, by and large, by the music and the movies of the ’30s.
We have a tremendous opportunity to try to start solving some of our overwhelming problems with population related environment, related to the hatred that exists between countries and religions, so we have a tremendous opportunity, but the dangers are very clearly there.
There’s always been a little bit of the crusader in me, and you need dragons to slay, without the conflict and the controversy I think that what I managed to do less, and I take a great deal of pride in the accomplishment.
The phenomena there is something in us that on the one hand bonds us with like people but somehow makes us suspicious of other people.
I was fortunate enough to be raised in a, in a very romantic time in terms of music, and the music itself simple reflected the much more romantic time.
I would like to think that I will be remembered as someone who had some positive impact on the sociosexual values of his time. And I think I’m secure and happy in that.
I think that sexual oppression and dictatorship go hand in hand.
I think being connected to younger people helps to keep you young and gives you a young attitude.
I think the Playboy philosophy is very, very connected to the American dream.
I felt quite frankly having been raised during the depression and looking back at the roaring twenties, the jazz age, which was a very magic timer in my mind because it was something that I had missed.
At a very early age I started a cartoon scrapbook, actually when I was in high school. And it became, in turn, a scrapbook of my life. And there are about 2,000 volumes.
People project their own dreams, fantasies, and prejudices onto my life. So people are either fans, or jealous, or disagree. Everybody marches to a different drummer.
I think that from the very beginning it wasn’t simply, what made Playboy so popular was not simply the naked ladies, what made the magazine so popular was, there was a point of view in the magazine, that you couldn’t run nude pictures without some kind of rational that they were art.
I’ve had death threats, but I’ve never been fearful for my life. Although I have traveled with security since the ’60s.
I think age, if you are healthy, I think age is largely a number. My mother lived to be 101. So I’m planning on another quarter century.