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"I’d love to be able to say that everything is pre-figured. I’d love to tell you I’m Bobby Fischer and I’m playing this game 20 moves ahead, but it’s just not true. The writers and I, once we created the Cousins and put them into motion, the problem that we saw for ourselves was, “My God, how do we pay this off?” It’s the exhilarating thing about this job and it’s the terrifying thing about this job: We actively try to paint ourselves into corners at the end of episodes - at the end of seasons, at the end of scenes sometimes - and then we try to extricate ourselves from those corners. So far, so good. But one of these days, we’ll probably paint ourselves into a corner we can’t escape from."

"Break “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” push past “The Tipping Point” and don’t waste your time chasing “The Long Tail.” Everything you really need to know about business can be learned watching Don Draper…………."

"The theme of season three is change. “We wanted our key art to be more high-concept,” Schupack explained, unveiling the new poster, which hits this week: Draper is sitting in his office, looking nonchalant, as water rises up to his knees. The image was devised by the Refinery, a Burbank ad agency that beat out three other firms. Schupack flipped through a binder of rejected ideas: Draper at an office party (“too kitschy”), Draper trapped on an ice floe (“too obvious”), Draper getting sucked into a vortex (“too end-of-the-world”). Once the final concept had been chosen, a replica of Draper’s office was built on the Paramount lot and filled with water, and Hamm posed in it for two hours. Earlier in the week, Schupack had taken a copy of the poster out to the sidewalk, to see how it would look in bright sunlight, and a security guard had weighed in: “He goes, ‘That’s how I feel sometimes! I’m just sitting in my office, totally unaffected, and the waters are rising around me.’ ” Season three also has a catchphrase: “The World’s Gone Mad.” (The first two seasons it was “Where the Truth Lies.”) It has a triple meaning, Schupack explained: mad change in the early sixties, mad change in the world today, and “the pop-cultural phenomenon—the world’s gone mad for ‘Mad Men.’ "