Matthew Weiner quotes:

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

I would never want my name on something that I did not write most of. Part of television is you get rewritten.

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

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.

It's very hard to turn writers against each other, believe it or not.

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.

Hate is more interesting than love...

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.

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.

That's the miracle of telling a story in film: You can express something inside someone's mind.

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.

Opinions can't be inaccurate.

I guess because I'm a liberal I think it's not people's natural instinct to be completely self-interested.

All human stories are interesting. You don't put a kid in a show because you need a device. They have a story, too.

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

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

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

Seeing movie people trying to get into TV now who don't understand that is very interesting.

Success has a lot of things that go along with it and I haven't experienced any personal resentment. I can't control any of that and I try not to worry about it. I hope that's not the case, you know. Most of the writers that I know and artists that I know understand what was going on. I think there's just as many things going on in the awards process that have to do with the show having won a few times.

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.

Who knows where the talent goes? Sometimes it goes where the money is. Sometimes I think writers are really interested in the glory.