Matthew Weiner Quotes

#1. I don't usually watch a lot of TV, but 'Mad Men' changed my perspective. I admire Matthew Weiner who came up with the idea and wrote such a great TV series, and the broadcasting company for being bold enough to air such a series.

Park Chan-wook

#2. Change is neither good or bad; it simply is.
[Written by Matthew Weiner]

Don Draper 'Mad Men'

#3. 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.

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

#10. 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.

Matthew Weiner

#11. 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.

Matthew Weiner

#12. 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.

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

#17. 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.

Matthew Weiner

#18. 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.

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

#23. Hate is more interesting than love ...

Matthew Weiner

#24. 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.

Matthew Weiner

#25. 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.

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

#28. [Peggy Olson]: Just try it.

Matthew Weiner

#29. 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.

Matthew Weiner

#30. Opinions can't be inaccurate.

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner

#33. 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.

Matthew Weiner

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

Matthew Weiner