Matthew Weiner Quotations

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opinions can't be inaccurate.

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.

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.

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.

Hate is more interesting than love...

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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