Who is your favorite novelist of all time?

Gabriel García Márquez. I suppose there’s no doubt that he is considered one of the greatest writers of all time, but I’m aware that this is a product of the time period in which I live. I read “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in college during a semester abroad in Spain and was on a train when I finished it, surrounded by strangers, dumbstruck that it was over and marveling that all of this came out of a human being. What was called then “magic realism” was exactly how I experienced the world. And the little poetic justices, like the character who had a withered arm because he once raised it to hit his mother, filled me with the desire to create. Equally, “Love in the Time of Cholera” seems to come up once a month, even though I read it 20 years ago.

And your favorite novelist writing today?

I don’t like making lists, but I suppose that’s the point of this. Michel Houellebecq has particularly impressed me. “The Elementary Particles,” in particular, felt deeply original and modern, and shocked me with its mixture of the poetic and the profane. He’s a very honest writer, and I look forward to his books. But I live in a book culture, and there’s so much out there today that I have yet to read.

There are so many great memoirs by celebrated admen of the 20th century. Do you have any favorites?

Jerry Della Femina’s “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor”; David Ogilvy’s “Confessions of an Advertising Man”; and the academic masterpiece “The Mirror Makers,” by Stephen Fox. All these reflect the attitude of advertising professionals that they wish to project. The role of creativity and its usefulness in business: That’s been important to the show. Of course, none of them get to who these people really are, and that’s just as interesting.

What other books have informed your approach to “Mad Men”?

I’m going to leave two of the most important books out for the purposes of answering the next question, but there has been a split between the literary influences on the show and the historical influences. I love the books that cross these boundaries. The fiction of John Cheever has a voice filled with irony and comedy and pain that, on some level, I’m always seeking to emulate. His short stories present themselves as episodes of TV do — with plenty of story and flawed characters presented without judgment. A story like “The Lowboy” focuses on siblings fighting over an inherited piece of furniture. That’s the kind of world I want to live in creatively. Other books include “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” by Jane Jacobs; the work of Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg; “Civilization and Its Discontents,” by Sigmund Freud; and of course, “Winesburg, Ohio,” by Sherwood Anderson. It’s worth mentioning that I love diaries and letters, and not just those of famous people. Nothing gives you insight into the human experience at any time in history more than the things people write to themselves.