TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing.
Hate is more interesting than love.
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.
The chance to tell personal, language-specific, culturally specific stories is really flourishing on TV and I think it's just the nature of movies and international demands that you need to get a much bigger audience. TV is more like independent film was. The forms of adult drama and certain kinds of sophisticated comedy, there's no room for them in the tentpole movie universe.
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.
I'm a different writer now. You don't sit in a room with Sopranos creator David Chase and writer Terence Winter for four years and not learn something. And just watching the way the show was done, and watching the way that David encouraged the imagination.
My life philosophy and personality has been driven by the fact that I am incapable of really understanding the future, on some level. I am in this moment. I take risks because I really don't think that far ahead.
Seeing movie people trying to get into TV now who don't understand that is very interesting.
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.
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.
You don't drink and smoke that much, and womanize that much, unless you really want to be punished, I think.
I am a competitive person, but it's so hard to do a show. Anybody who gets to the point where they get their show on the air, I wish them the best. It's too hard. I'd rather waste energy thinking good things on myself.
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.
I'm very supportive of creative people being paid for the work that they do.
Identity is part of drama to me. Who am I, why am I behaving this way, and am I aware of it?
Opinions can't be inaccurate.
I'm in the entertainment business, where you're only as good as your last show.
It's an ugly thing to see ambition and to see people satisfying themselves.
It's very hard to turn writers against each other, believe it or not.
You can do a lot with a commercial break - you can change days, you can suggest the passage of time. So sometimes that's a great thing artistically, to know that's going to be there. Obviously you'd always prefer that people see it straight through, and you don't want them to be taken out of it by advertising, but that's the reality of what's paying the bills here.
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.
That's the miracle of telling a story in film: You can express something inside someone's mind.
All human stories are interesting. You don't put a kid in a show because you need a device. They have a story, too.
My major goal is to take my bathrobe off before the kids get home from school.
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.
