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.

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.

As far as casting, I'm there for every single person that's cast. Even if it's one word, I'm there for their auditions.

Every single word that's on the screen, I oversee. There's nothing that's shot, I'm not involved in. The scripts go through multiple drafts, and I work with the writers on all these things. And I'm extremely involved in the writing process.

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

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

I don't want to pretend like I'm clairvoyant or anything, but I had a tremendous sense of malaise about our political future. This is right around the millennium, right around 1999, when I wrote it. The Sopranos certainly reflected that; when I saw that on the air, I was like "Oh my God, I'm not alone." But it doesn't seem that the culture really caught up with that. George W. Bush won two elections... I'm not even trying to say this from a political standpoint. I think there is a resonance to the kind of glory of that period, and the foreboding of what happened.