Quotes by Matthew Weiner - Page 1 | QuoteForever

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Opinions can't be inaccurate.
Matthew Weiner / Director
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Hate is more interesting than love.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Hate
Interesting
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I am a competitive person. But more good TV is more good TV.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Competitive Person
Competitive
Good I Am Person
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It's very hard to turn writers against each other, believe it or not.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Believe
Hard
Turns
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TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Hate
People
Writing
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It's an ugly thing to see ambition and to see people satisfying themselves.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Ambition
People
Satisfying
Ugly Things
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I'm very supportive of creative people being paid for the work that they do.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Creative
Creative People
People
Supportive
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My major goal is to take my bathrobe off before the kids get home from school.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Kids
Home
School
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I'm in the entertainment business, where you're only as good as your last show.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Entertainment
Entertainment Business
Lasts
Shows
Good Business Your
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Believe it or not, there's a lot of humor in 'Mad Men.' Especially in the dark moments.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Mad Men
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Seeing movie people trying to get into TV now who don't understand that is very interesting.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Interesting
People
Trying
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Identity is part of drama to me. Who am I, why am I behaving this way, and am I aware of it?
Matthew Weiner / Director
Drama
Identity
Way
Behaving
Who Am I
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That's the miracle of telling a story in film: You can express something inside someone's mind.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Mind
Miracle
Stories
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I guess because I'm a liberal I think it's not people's natural instinct to be completely self-interested.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Instinct
Liberal
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Super confident people with no problems and great marriages and great parenting are not good entertainment.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Entertainment
People
Problem
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You don't drink and smoke that much, and womanize that much, unless you really want to be punished, I think.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Drink
Thinking
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I would never want my name on something that I did not write most of. Part of television is you get rewritten.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Rewritten
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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 / Director
Kids
Interesting
Needs
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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 / Director
Best Way
Poignancy
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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.
Matthew Weiner / Director
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I think there's a kind of elegance to it, to work within that framework where what you don't see is often more enticing.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Elegance
Kind
Thinking
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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 / Director
Typical
Tv
Sounds
Tv Show
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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 / Director
Sometimes
Talent
Thinking
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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 / Director
Revolution
Breaks
Turning
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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 / Director
People
Selling
Trying
Manipulating
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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 / Director
Men
Believe
Mad
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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 / Director
Intellectual
Lessons
Today
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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 / Director
Men
Character
Mean
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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 / Director
Men
Mad
Years
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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 / Director
Architect
Artistic
Criticism
High Risk
Profession
Sensitive
Threshold
Low
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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 / Director
Drama
Fall
Real
Real Life
Life Movies Look
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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.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Personality
Philosophy
Thinking
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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.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Energy
Thinking
Wish
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It's impossible for me, without getting a big wide shot of Manhattan, to convince people that it's another day. But if we go to a commercial and we come up and people are in different clothes, you know it's another day.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Different
Impossible
People
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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 / Director
Best Friend
Happy Marriage
Midst
Realization
Male
Wondering
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On the set, I visit the set for a lot of the rehearsals, and there's always a writer on set. And then I'm involved in post-production, very intensely involved in editing, and the sound mix and color timing. Really, I have about nine jobs.
Matthew Weiner / Director
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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.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Multiple
Single Word
Writing
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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.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Imagination
Different
Winter
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But you know what, honestly? I'm not that interested in advertising. I think it's a great way... It's such a huge part of our culture. It's like saying, "Are you interested in hair?" It's such a part of our life, and it's such a reflection of how we feel about ourselves, and what we're interested in, and what we want to be.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Culture
Reflection
Thinking
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I was never really that worried about being a member of the Sopranos crew. I think it looks kind of fun to not have to work, to not have to take crap from anybody. And then there's the reality check in there, which is that you do have to work, you do have to take crap from people, and you can fail, and all these other things.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Fun
Reality
Thinking
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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.
Matthew Weiner / Director
People
Reality
Taken
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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.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Drama
Independent
Thinking
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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.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Artist
Awards
Thinking
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I have this amazing team that I trust. I completely go with their decisions on things. I don't have to go in and micromanage everything. And I think the other thing is, you start to sort of... I wouldn't say relax, because I've never relaxed. But I've tried to have more confidence in the things I like, or the things other people like. That's really the big thing in this job, to second-guess yourself all the time.
Matthew Weiner / Director
People
Team
Thinking
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The other thing - and writers can say whatever they want - is casting. You need to find a person who can inhabit that role, who can not sugarcoat the bad stuff, and not be too hard on the good stuff, but who can come across as a three-dimensional human being with some depth and some thought about what they're doing. When you find James Gandolfini or Jon Hamm, someone who can inhabit this role but still has a natural humanity to them, no matter what they're doing? It's a gift.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Humanity
Natural
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The weirdest thing with friends, the way you measure it is if you go without communicating for months at a time, you can sit down and within five seconds be right where you were. I know it's a cliché, but quality not quantity, and that bond will not disintegrate. It does need to be tended to but it won't go away. It's amazing, though - I'm here in New York where my best friend from college lives, and we see each other twice a year and we're right where we were and a lot of it's unspoken.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Quality
College
Going Away
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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.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Political
Thinking
Trying
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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.
Matthew Weiner / Director
Cartoon
Children
Reality
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