Matthew Weiner

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

“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 an ugly thing to see ambition and to see people satisfying themselves.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”