MATTHEW WEINER

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

On the set, I visit the set for a lot of the rehearsals, and there's always a writer on set. And then I'm involved in post-production, very intensely involved in editing, and the sound mix and color timing. Really, I have about nine jobs.

I was never really that worried about being a member of the Sopranos crew. I think it looks kind of fun to not have to work, to not have to take crap from anybody. And then there's the reality check in there, which is that you do have to work, you do have to take crap from people, and you can fail, and all these other things.

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

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 don't want to pretend like I'm clairvoyant or anything, but I had a tremendous sense of malaise about our political future. This is right around the millennium, right around 1999, when I wrote it. The Sopranos certainly reflected that; when I saw that on the air, I was like "Oh my God, I'm not alone." But it doesn't seem that the culture really caught up with that. George W. Bush won two elections... I'm not even trying to say this from a political standpoint. I think there is a resonance to the kind of glory of that period, and the foreboding of what happened.

I have this amazing team that I trust. I completely go with their decisions on things. I don't have to go in and micromanage everything. And I think the other thing is, you start to sort of... I wouldn't say relax, because I've never relaxed. But I've tried to have more confidence in the things I like, or the things other people like. That's really the big thing in this job, to second-guess yourself all the time.

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.