Matthew Weiner Quotes

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

[Peggy Olson]: Just try it.

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

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

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

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

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.

Her Mother and Father were especially blind to feelings. Her Father denied he even had feelings and her Mother assumed everyone shared hers. Heather didn't know for years that her ability to see people's feelings and even feel them sometimes was unusual and when she discovered that the cruelty and rudeness that adults and friends inflicted on each other was unintentional or at least uninformed, she decided to withdraw, overwhelmed by the pain of typical human behavior.

You can't set a clock for yourself. If you do, you are not a writer.

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.

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.

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.

Artists frequently hide the steps that lead to their masterpieces. They want their work and their career to be shrouded in the mystery that it all came out at once. It's called hiding the brushstrokes, and those who do it are doing a disservice to people who admire their work and seek to emulate them. If you don't get to see the notes, the rewrites, and the steps, it's easy to look at a finished product and be under the illusion that it just came pouring out of someone's head like that. People who are young, or still struggling, can get easily discouraged, because they can't do it like they thought it was done. An artwork is a finished product, and it should be, but I always swore to myself that I would not hide my brushstrokes.

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

I keep going to a lot of places and ending up somewhere I've already been

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

Opinions can't be inaccurate.

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

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

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

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.

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.