Aaron Sorkin Quotes Page 2

“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.”

“It's a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Television is a visual medium. You have to create some kind of visual interest. And it's entertainment for your eyes.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The properties of people and the properties of character have almost nothing to do with each other. They really don't. I know it seems like they do because we look alike, but people don't speak in dialogue. Their lives don't unfold in a series of scenes that form a narrative arc.”

“The rules are all in a sixty-four-page pamphlet by Aristotle called 'Poetics.' It was written almost three thousand years ago, but I promise you, if something is wrong with what you're writing, you've probably broken one of Aristotle's rules.”

“The rules of drama are very much separate from the properties of life. I think that's especially true of Shakespeare.”

“The upside of web-based journalism is that everybody gets a chance. The downside is that everybody gets a chance.”

“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.”

“There have been times – and not just on 'The Newsroom,' but on 'The West Wing,' 'Sports Night,' 'Studio 60'... – where it was hard to look the cast and crew in the eye, when I put a script on the table that I knew just wasn't good enough.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Trying to guess what the (mass) audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that's not going to be me. So when David Fincher comes along and wants to direct 'The Social Network,' when Bennett Miller comes along and wants to direct 'Moneyball,' or when Danny Boyle wants to direct 'Jobs'? Hallelujah. I want them directing it.”

“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?”

“When we were doing 'The West Wing,' the hardest thing about doing 'The West Wing' was being compared to yourself. You go out there and want every episode to be as good as your best episode. I wrote 88 episodes of 'The West Wing,' and when you do that, one of them is going to be your 88th best, so your 88th best better be pretty good.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”