As long as you keep one foot in the real world while the other foot’s in a fairy tale, that fairy tale is going to seem kind of attainable.
Aaron Sorkin
Don’t ever forget that a small group of thoughtful people can change the world, it’s the only thing that ever has.
Aaron Sorkin
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
Decisions are made by those who show up.
Aaron Sorkin
I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue.
Aaron Sorkin
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
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
Not all paintings are abstract; they’re not all Jackson Pollock. There’s value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.
Aaron Sorkin
All my heroes wore coats and ties to work. What happened to men wearing hats? Maybe I should bring back hats.
Aaron Sorkin
There’s a great tradition in storytelling that’s thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that’s really what I wanted to do.
Aaron Sorkin
I am all for everyone having a voice; I just don’t think everyone has earned the microphone. And that’s what the Internet has done.
Aaron Sorkin
I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.
Aaron Sorkin
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
It’s nice that HBO is in business with the audience and not with the advertisers. There’s a difference.
Aaron Sorkin
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
There are some screw-ups headed your way. I wish I could tell you that there was a trick to avoiding the screw-ups… but they’re coming for ya. It’s a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.
Aaron Sorkin
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
Writing never comes easy. The difference between Page 2 and Page Nothing is the difference between life and death.
Aaron Sorkin
I spend most of my days pacing around, muttering that I have no ideas, feeling like I’m walking a plank.
Aaron Sorkin
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
It’s a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.
Aaron Sorkin
I think socializing on the Internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.
Aaron Sorkin
I’m neither a millennial nor a hipster.
Aaron Sorkin
I do not speak through my characters; it’s not a ventriloquist act.
Aaron Sorkin
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
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
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
With ‘The Social Network,’ I got into it at first because frankly I thought there was a cool courtroom drama to be had with the intellectual properties. And then what further drew me in was that the most extraordinary social networking device ever created was created by the world’s most antisocial person. I liked that story.
Aaron Sorkin
Everything can be going well, but if I’m not writing, I’m not happy. When I’m writing well, I’m like a different person.
Aaron Sorkin
‘Molly’s Game’ was a true story about a remarkable young woman named Molly Bloom. She was this close to going to the Olympics; she was ranked third in North America in women’s moguls.
Aaron Sorkin
I’ve loved every minute I’ve spent in television. And I’ve had much more failure, as traditionally measured, than success in television. I’ve done four shows, and only one of them was the ‘West Wing.’
Aaron Sorkin
I feel like the better version of myself is on paper… I’d rather have people know me on paper.
Aaron Sorkin
The upside of web-based journalism is that everybody gets a chance. The downside is that everybody gets a chance.
Aaron Sorkin
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
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
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
Any time you get two people in a room who disagree about anything, the time of day, there is a scene to be written. That’s what I look for.
Aaron Sorkin
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
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
It’s important to remember that, first and foremost, if not only, this is entertainment. ‘The West Wing’ isn’t meant to be good for you.
Aaron Sorkin
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
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
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
Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.
Aaron Sorkin
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
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
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
And my friends, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Aaron Sorkin
I love writing but 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’ll go peaceable-like.
Aaron Sorkin
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
I don’t have a great instrument. I don’t have the kind of ungodly control over my voice and body that great actors have. And I’ve worked with enough great actors to know that I’m not one.
Aaron Sorkin
My parents took me to see plays, starting from when I was very little. Oftentimes, I was too young to understand. I don’t know what my parents were thinking – ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’ when I was eight years old, that kind of thing. So lots of times, I didn’t understand what was going on, but I just loved the sound of dialogue.
Aaron Sorkin