Top 100 Aaron Sorkin Quotes
#1. I have all of the Apple products. Everything I've ever written, I've written on a Mac. My first computer, my roommates and I chipped in, and we got that first Macintosh - 128K. It had as much memory as a greeting card that plays music.
Aaron Sorkin
#2. This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your fifteen minutes are up.
Aaron Sorkin
#3. Oratory should raise your heart rate. Oratory should blow the doors off the place.
Aaron Sorkin
#4. I get nervous before openings or premieres or when someone's reading a new script, and I get nervous when my daughter isn't in my immediate field of vision.
Aaron Sorkin
#5. I have a big problem with people who glamorize dumbness and demonize education and intellect. And I'm giving a pretty good description of Sarah Palin right now.
Aaron Sorkin
#6. I do not diminish the incredible symbolic importance of a black man getting elected president. But my euphoria was a smart guy getting elected president. Maybe for the first time in my lifetime we had elected one of the thousand smartest Americans president.
Aaron Sorkin
#7. The downside to series television is that the schedule is ferocious. It constantly feels like you have a midterm due that you haven't started yet.
Aaron Sorkin
#8. Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.
Aaron Sorkin
#9. Conflict, when used as a device, makes for good television and bad journalism.
Aaron Sorkin
#10. I have a lot of respect for people who are great at ad-libbing and for writers and directors who are able to create a scene in which that works. Judd Apatow is fantastic at it. But as an audience member, I like the sound of something that's been written - I like it to sound written.
Aaron Sorkin
#11. People who don't know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn.
Aaron Sorkin
#12. 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.
Aaron Sorkin
#13. My resting pulse as a writer is writing idealistically and romantically; aspirationally. My taste lies in quixotic heroes.
Aaron Sorkin
#14. If you're dumb, surround yourself with smart people. If you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.
(Isaac Jaffe, Sports Night)
Aaron Sorkin
#16. I'm a playwright. All I care about is the play being good.
Aaron Sorkin
#17. That's a very real feeling - that I don't have a story to tell. I'm not a pure storyteller. I have a tough time with story.
Aaron Sorkin
#18. A news organization has a much different responsibility. I might not be telling you the whole story. I might not be telling you a story in a manner that is properly sophisticated.
Aaron Sorkin
#19. There (is) order and even great beauty in what looks like total chaos. If we look closely enough at the randomness around us, patterns will start to emerge.
Aaron Sorkin
#20. 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.
Aaron Sorkin
#21. What's interesting, is that I've found that the more accomplished a director is, the more secure they are in giving direction that sounds incredibly unsophisticated.
Aaron Sorkin
#22. If you lined up 10 writers and asked them to write a movie about Steve Jobs, you'd get 10 very different movies.
Aaron Sorkin
#23. I want to convey that I'm crazy about the Kardashians - but I'm not sure which is which.
Aaron Sorkin
#24. If you feel that strongly about something, you have an obligation to try and change my mind.
Aaron Sorkin
#25. It seems to me that more and more we've come to expect less and less from each other, and I think that should change.
Aaron Sorkin
#26. We live in a world that has walls and those walls need to be guarded by men with guns.
Aaron Sorkin
#27. I'm a registered Republican, I only seem liberal because I believe that hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not gay marriage.
Aaron Sorkin
#28. Toby: All right. It couldn't have gone far, right?
Sam: No.
Toby: Somewhere in this building ... is our talent.
Aaron Sorkin
#29. The Internet, in general, I find troubling. The anonymity has made us all meaner and dumber. This thing that was supposed to bring us closer together, I see it doing the opposite.
Aaron Sorkin
#30. 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.
Aaron Sorkin
#31. First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one.
Aaron Sorkin
#32. I think socializing on the Internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.
Aaron Sorkin
#33. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor. I was acting in all the school plays. I went to school for acting. I was really sure that that's what I wanted to do.
Aaron Sorkin
#34. Film doesn't have to worry. Movies are awesome. There's no war going on, theaters aren't going to lose.
Aaron Sorkin
#35. Perhaps something like Facebook couldn't have been invented by somebody who goes out five nights a week and has a ton of friends and makes friends really easily.
Aaron Sorkin
#36. Our responsibility is to captivate you for however long we've asked for your attention. That said, there is tremendous drama to be gotten from the great, what you would say, heavy issues.
Aaron Sorkin
#37. We're about to shoot an episode on Air Force One, for instance, and we're going to take liberties, small liberties, with Air Force One, as we take small liberties with our White House set.
Aaron Sorkin
#38. I get the 'The New York Times' and 'Los Angeles Times' thrown at my door every morning. I'll read the front page of 'The New York Times,' then the op-eds, then scan the arts section and then the sports section. Then I do the same with the 'L.A. Times.'
Aaron Sorkin
#39. I am uncomfortable talking about the things that I write. It seems unseemly to me. I have no problem at all when I see anybody else talking about the same project, but I feel my work should speak for itself.
Aaron Sorkin
#40. Humans know when it's not a good story. Unless you do this for a living, you may not know exactly why you don't like a story, but you can't fool an audience ever. They know when you have it and they know when you don't.
Aaron Sorkin
#41. A song in a musical works best when a character has to sing - when words won't do the trick anymore. The same idea applies to a long speech in a play or a movie or on television. You want to force the character out of a conversational pattern.
Aaron Sorkin
#42. There really isn't a story that you can't tell inside of it. It's very much a clearinghouse for anything that goes on in the world. So you're not at all limited.
Aaron Sorkin
#43. I would love for people to think that I am as quick, clever, smart and heroic as the characters that I write, but those characters are characters.
Aaron Sorkin
#44. The upside of web-based journalism is that everybody gets a chance. The downside is that everybody gets a chance.
Aaron Sorkin
#45. Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt.
Aaron Sorkin
#46. Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word 'census,' and people fall asleep.
Aaron Sorkin
#47. The first thing I wrote was a one-act play that got accepted at a one-act play festival, and I was in it along with Nathan Lane and a couple of other very good actors.
Aaron Sorkin
#48. I'm not on Facebook, and I don't tweet, but I know plenty of people who love both.
Aaron Sorkin
#49. I desperately need the love of complete strangers. That's one reason I overtip. I love when skycaps, waiters, and valets are happy to see me.
Aaron Sorkin
#50. I'm crazy about 'Breaking Bad,' but I wouldn't know how to write an episode of it.
Aaron Sorkin
#51. 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.
Aaron Sorkin
#52. Don't try to guess what it is people want and give it to them. Don't ask for a show of hands. Try your best to write what you like, what you think your friends would like and what you think your father would like and then cross your fingers ... The most valuable thing you have is your own voice.
Aaron Sorkin
#53. 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.
Aaron Sorkin
#54. If the characters on 'The West Wing' were watching a TV show wherein a character like Trump was leading in the polls, they wouldn't find it believable.
Aaron Sorkin
#56. Trying to guess what the (mass) audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.
Aaron Sorkin
#57. I like writing idealistically, romantically and swashbucklingly.
Aaron Sorkin
#58. She's a person; the doctor pronounces her dead, not the news.
Aaron Sorkin
#59. It wouldn't kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.
Aaron Sorkin
#60. 'Steve Jobs' is my seventh movie. I believe, if you added them up, I don't think there is more than a total of 10 minutes that takes place in a person's home. They're all in offices, courtrooms, laboratories, things like that.
Aaron Sorkin
#61. TOBY: The world can move or not by changing some words.
Aaron Sorkin
#62. 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.
Aaron Sorkin
#65. When a movie is being rolled out, the studio publicists and all our individual publicists get together and come up with bullet points and talking points - 'Make sure you stay away from this,' and 'Don't say that quite that way, because that quote can be taken out of context,' and that kind of thing.
Aaron Sorkin
#66. While I was doing 'The Newsroom,' I always had the news on on different networks on different TVs around my house and around my office.
Aaron Sorkin
#67. Rule of storytelling: When a character is shoved against a wall, shove them against a wall harder.
Aaron Sorkin
#68. I'm sick of girls who don't know how to high-five,
Aaron Sorkin
#69. The rules of drama are very much separate from the properties of life. I think that's especially true of Shakespeare.
Aaron Sorkin
#70. I was sitting on a bench having a bagel, but from where I was both jogging and sculng looks good to me.
Sam
Aaron Sorkin
#71. It's one thing to be asked to respect someone else's religion. It's another to be asked to respect their taboos.
Aaron Sorkin
#72. A friend is somebody who says the same things to your face that they would say if you're not in the room.
Aaron Sorkin
#73. When I wrote 'The West Wing,' the juice behind it was that in popular culture, our leaders in government are generally portrayed as Machiavellian, or as idiots. I thought, well, how about writing about a group of hyper-competent people?
Aaron Sorkin
#74. I find television, and particularly live television, very romantic: the idea that there is this small group of people, way up high, in a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan, beaming this signal out into the night.
Aaron Sorkin
#75. It's an election year. We would prefer that voters didn't use common sense.
Aaron Sorkin
#76. 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.
Aaron Sorkin
#77. Honestly, I don't try to guess at what most people want. I don't think I'd guess right, and I just think that that's not a good recipe for storytelling. I try to write what I like, what I think my friends would like.
Aaron Sorkin
#78. I'll get cast occasionally as sort of the jerk version of myself, and I have fun doing that. But it's really better for everyone if I stay behind the camera.
Aaron Sorkin
#79. An artist's job is to captivate ... if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.
Aaron Sorkin
#80. Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight.
Aaron Sorkin
#81. Toby Zeigler: There's literally no one in the world I don't hate right now.
Aaron Sorkin
#82. 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.
Aaron Sorkin
#83. I am truly at my happiest not when I am writing an aria for an actor or making a grand political or social point. I am at my happiest when I've figured out a fun way for somebody to slip on a banana peel.
Aaron Sorkin
#84. We have a natural resentment toward government, which was how we were born
Aaron Sorkin
#85. Only criminals and adulterers should have to hide who they are.
Aaron Sorkin
#86. When I was starting out, William Goldman took me under his wing, and he's still the person I show pages to.
Aaron Sorkin
#87. When I create a TV show, it's so that I can write it. I'm not an empire builder; my writing staff is usually a combination of two kinds of people - experts in the world the show is set in, and young writers who will not be unhappy if they're not writing scripts.
Aaron Sorkin
#88. And my friends, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
Aaron Sorkin
#89. I spend most of my days pacing around, muttering that I have no ideas, feeling like I'm walking a plank.
Aaron Sorkin
#90. You don't need to wear a patch on your arm to have honor.
Aaron Sorkin
#91. Don't tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing.
Aaron Sorkin
#92. You can only write, 'Somebody wants something, something else is in their way of getting it.'
Aaron Sorkin
#93. Tell me what you think and then tell me what the really smart person in the room who disagrees with you thinks.
Aaron Sorkin
#94. I do not speak through my characters; it's not a ventriloquist act.
Aaron Sorkin
#95. My way of getting the best from people on a set is to notice their work, to make every prop master, every seamstress, part of 'The Newsroom' or 'The West Wing' or 'Steve Jobs.'
Aaron Sorkin
#96. I grew up in the theatre. It's where I got my start. Writing a television drama with theatrical dialogue about the theatre is beyond perfection.
Aaron Sorkin
#97. President Bartlet:
There's a delegation of cardiologists having their pictures taken in the Blue Room. You wouldn't think you could find a group of people more arrogant than the fifteen of us, but there they are, right upstairs in the Blue Room.
Aaron Sorkin
#98. It's populated by people who, by and large, have terrific communication skills. Every day is an extraordinary day. For me, it was just a great area for storytelling.
Aaron Sorkin
#99. I had a lot of survival jobs. One was for the Witty Ditty singing-telegram company. I was in the red-and-white stripes with the straw boater hat and kazoo. Balloons. Even when you're sleeping on a friend's couch, you have to pay some kind of rent.
Aaron Sorkin
#100. I've never met anyone who has said, "My goal is to make America mediocre." That's a kind of hard-right conservative fallacy.
Aaron Sorkin
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