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

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.

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

You don't drink and smoke that much, and womanize that much, unless you really want to be punished, I think.

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.

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

I know that telling the story, there are certain events I want to skip, and certain events I want to hit. The time passing allows for - if you're really following people's lives, and this isn't a cartoon - someone gets pregnant, a child will be born, etc. You really don't want to be locked into "Every episode is a month later." The show is very intense to make. There's always going to be some downtime between seasons, and to me, it really helps to come back to the next season in the reality of that world, and have almost as much time passed in their lives as has passed in yours.