Aaron Sorkin Quotes

Aaron Sorkin offers witty, plain-spoken insights on creativity, knowledge and reference that feel like a clever conversation.

33 quotes

1. Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you'd build a castle at the beach. You're just taking your hands and you're mounting up sand.

2. 'Is it (Sports Night) a comedy or a drama?' That's generally not a question I try and answer for myself before I'm going to write something. The example I would use is, if you're driving in your car and you're listening to a rock 'n' roll station on the radio and a song comes on, and in the song you hear elements of jazz and folk and you hear strings in there ... it's not necessary to answer the question, 'Is this jazz, is this folk, or is this rock?' before you decide to listen to it and like it or not.

3. People who don't know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn.

4. I love writing but I hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says. ' You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy, I'm a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I don't want any trouble. I'll go peaceable-like.

5. A Few Good Men (play and film)

6. Malice (film)

7. The American President (film)

8. Sports Night (television series)

9. The West Wing (television series, first four seasons)

10. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (television series)

11. Charlie Wilson's War (film)

12. Conflict, when used as a device, makes for good television and bad journalism.

13. Film doesn't have to worry. Movies are awesome. There's no war going on, theaters aren't going to lose.

14. People don't live their lives in a series of scenes that form a dramatic narrative, they don't speak in dialogue, they're not lit by a cinematographer or scored by a composer. The properties of real life and the properties of drama have almost nothing to do with each other. The difference between writing about reporters and being a reporter is the same as the difference between drawing a building and building a building.

15. One of the biggest challenges in the past for me in working on the networks was that audiences have grown accustomed to television being something that keeps you company-background music, something that you have on while you're flipping through a magazine, cooking dinner, talking on the phone, putting the kids to bed.

16. You're going to fall down, but the world doesn't care how many times you fall down, as long as it's one fewer than the numbers of times you get back up.

17. We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns.

18. As an audience member, I like the sound of something that's been written - I like it to sound written. And then, of course, you can't do it without the musicians who can play it.

19. She's a person; the doctor pronounces her dead, not the news.

20. It's nice that HBO is in business with the audience and not with the advertisers. There's a difference.

21. Government should be a place where people can come together, and no one gets left behind. No one…gets left behind. An instrument of good.

22. Television from its inception had the number one goal to alienate as few people as possible. That's why if you look at 1950s, 1960s American sitcoms, the characters don't live any place in particular, religion is never discussed, politics is never discussed, you never really know what anyone's job is; nothing that could make these people seem different from you is ever discussed.

23. Josh: So, Toby, it’s election night. What do you say about a country that goes out of its way to protect even those citizens that try to destroy it? Toby: God bless America.

24. The hardest thing for me is getting started. If I'm writing a script, really 90 per cent of it would be just walking around, climbing the walls, just trying to put the idea together. Then the final 10 per cent would be writing it.

25. I don't think I write differently when I'm writing a screenplay, as opposed to a stage play or a teleplay. Maybe if I were in a film class and there was time to think about it, we could point out differences.

26. You know, one of the things I like about this world, or at least I like about the way we're presenting this world, is these issues are terribly complicated - not nearly as black and white as we're led to believe.

27. My resting pulse as a writer is writing idealistically and romantically; aspirationally. My taste lies in quixotic heroes.

28. I'm not interested in the difference between good and bad, I'm interested in the differences between good and great.

29. Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.

30. I love writing. I'm not particularly comfortable in the actual world - I'm much more comfortable on the page. So if I could have a life where I could just slip the pages under the door and somebody would slip me a meal back, then that would be perfect for me.

31. But HBO is less interested in how many people are watching than in how much the people who are watching are liking the show. They didn't set up their business model to make writers happy. It's just a nice unintended consequence.

32. The Monica Lewinsky scandal was happening at the very time I was writing the West Wing pilot and it was hard, at least for Americans, to look at the White House and think of anything but a punch line. Plus a show about politics, a show that took place in Washington, had just never worked before in American television. So the show was delayed for a year.

33. I'm a playwright. All I care about is the play being good.