Mad Men

January Jones: They went into a lot of detail with all the undergarments, you know, the pointy bras, and the girdles and the stockings and the garter belts, it's all 100 percent authentic. It's fun, except when you need to take a deep breath.

Alan Taylor: You can look at these men and say, "My god, how sexist they are, how racist they are, how anti-Semitic they are," and his darker point is we haven't changed that much, we're just better at being polite.

Jon Hamm: The idea of advertising is you will become successful, whether it's smoking a cigarette, having a cocktail, wearing the right suit, going to the right restaurant, voting for the right political candidate, you will achieve happiness.

Tom Palmer: This period is sort of the beginning of the end of innocence in a way, which came a few years later in the sixties, probably with a lot of the assassinations and everything.

Maria Jacquemetton: We have to constantly, as writers, put our mindset in 1960.

Matthew Weiner: There is an incredible amount of indulgence and especially in this environment, it is not an exaggeration that people used to drink the minute they got in the office.

Jon Hamm: This particular group of people sort of defined American culture as we see it now.

Maria Jacquemetton: To me it's about the birth of the American dream, how it started, what it means, and what lays behind it.

Matthew Weiner: Being on The Sopranos those four and a half years, I'm trying to do something different where you may not know what's going to happen and the people will surprise you.

Alan Taylor: It's a world that has an allure like the gangster world of The Sopranos. You are disgusted by it, repelled by it, but also thrilled by it.

Elizabeth Moss: The one thing that I think every single female on this set will agree with is, thank god we got rid of girdles, because they are not fun--they can't ever have been fun.

Matthew Weiner: Doing this show without smoking would have been a joke. It would have been sanitary and it would have been phony.

Jon Hamm: I talked to somebody who said they watched the pilot and they said I smoked 76 cigarettes in the pilot.

Matthew Weiner: I have a picture of my mother taking me out of the bathtub with a cigarette in her mouth. It was part of our life.

Elisabeth Moss: It was accepted when you were a secretary that you were going to be hit on. There was nothing you could do about it, and women didn't even think they could do anything about it. And it was just accepted that at some point you were going to date your boss or at some point date somebody in the office.... Nobody cared if they were married or not.

Matthew Weiner: I've watched a lot of TV in my life and I really really try not to do things that lie about human behavior.

Matthew Weiner: The most entertaining thing is to see real human behavior played out. The negative human qualities are where the drama is.

Matthew Weiner: We get a chance to talk about American business. In the end how much risk can you take? How big is your mouth? Who's on your side? Whose ass do you kiss? When is it time to stop kissing that ass and kick it? And that's one of the things that I think is fun about working in this world.

Matthew Weiner: There's a lot of drinking, a lot of smoking, a lot of steak eating, unprotected sex, it's Disneyland.

Matthew Weiner: Advertising to me, at this period, was probably one of the most glamorous jobs you can have in the United States because it was a job that was creative, had a fairly substantial salary, had very loose working conditions, and lack of respect for authority.

Jon Hamm: These people's careers, their jobs, are designed to sell people on the idea of what makes them happy. At this point in time what made people happy was smoking and drinking and having sex with as many woman as you possibly can and whether you're married or not.

Matthew Weiner: I don't think advertising makes people want things, I think advertising figures out why they want them and then gives it to them.

Bryan Batt: What I like about it when watching the pilot you see aspects of social life that exists today just as it did in 1960 with a completely different facade. You know, it's so much how we have changed and how much we haven't.

Matthew Weiner: This is kind of a science fiction environment, and there are a lot of things that you can't talk about now, that you can talk about in this world.

Matthew Weiner: You can't fill out your checkbook and watch this show.