Quotes from Matthew Weiner

If you've ever had somebody try to sell you something - people who can sell, they really are not manipulating you. They are selling themselves.

If you want to reach any kind of poignancy or meaning a lot of times, coming from comedy is the best way to get there.

I am trying to be as impartial as possible. As you can tell from the trailers for Mad Men, I am a person who believes that you should know nothing.

Super confident people with no problems and great marriages and great parenting are not good entertainment.

My major goal is to take my bathrobe off before the kids get home from school.

I am a competitive person. But more good TV is more good TV.

Identity is part of drama to me. Who am I, why am I behaving this way, and am I aware of it?

The show is not a history lesson or intellectual exploration. It is entertainment based on tension, irony and storytelling that is closely related to today's life.

In movies and TV, we tend to fall into tropes about how characters might get out of problems. But when you look at real life, you realize that there is a lot of drama of not being able to get out of the problems.

I had a realization in the midst of my happy marriage that I had kind of lost most of my friends - my male friends in particular. And I started wondering if my wife, who was certainly my best friend, supplanted those relationships.

My wife's an architect, so she definitely has a very high-risk artistic profession, and she gets the idea that you're really sensitive, you really care what people think, you have a low threshold for criticism.

It took seven years from the time I wrote Mad Men until it finally got on the screen. I lived every day with that script as if it were going to happen tomorrow. That's the faith you have to have.

Believe it or not, there's a lot of humor in 'Mad Men.' Especially in the dark moments.

You don't drink and smoke that much, and womanize that much, unless you really want to be punished, I think.

As far as I can tell, 1968 is a year about change, about revolution, about violence, about people turning inwards as community breaks down.

This sounds really craven on some level, but on some level, a lot of what I'm doing is trying to not do a typical TV show.

It's an ugly thing to see ambition and to see people satisfying themselves.

I do find it sometimes that people project their own feelings on to the characters and I think that there is a certain amount of sexism - I mean the proprietary nature, for men and women.

TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing.

I'm very supportive of creative people being paid for the work that they do.

I think there's a kind of elegance to it, to work within that framework where what you don't see is often more enticing.

I'm in the entertainment business, where you're only as good as your last show.