Aaron Sorkin Quotes

Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day: civility, respect, kindness, character.

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

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.

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.

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

Stupid people surround themselves with smart people. Smart people surround themselves with smart people who disagree with them.

An artist’s job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.

Rule of storytelling: When a character is shoved against a wall, shove them against a wall harder.

A friend is somebody who says the same things to your face that they would say if you're not in the room.

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.

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.

Socializing on the internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.

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.

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.

Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt.

Decisions are made by those who show up.

There are no Asian movie stars

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.

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.

Tell me what you think and then tell me what the really smart person in the room who disagrees with you thinks.

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.

A hero would die for his country, but he'd much rather live for it.

Music is what mathematics does on a Saturday night.

If you close your eyes you can imagine the hackers sitting in a room, combing through the documents to find the ones that will draw the most blood. And in a room next door are American journalists doing the same thing. As demented and criminal as it is, at least the hackers are doing it for a cause. The press is doing it for a nickel.

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

The real problem with all drugs is that they work. Fantastically. They're great, right up until the moment they kill you.

You can only write, 'Somebody wants something, something else is in their way of getting it.'

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.

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

When I feel that something I'm writing is going well, everything in my life is good and the things in my life that aren't good are completely manageable. If it's not going well, Miss America could be standing there in a swimsuit handing me a nobel price and I wouldn't be happy about it

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

If you feel that strongly about something, you have an obligation to try and change my mind.

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.

Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.

Toby Zeigler: There's literally no one in the world I don't hate right now.

Writers are opposite of athletes, they get better with age

Roxy Sorkin, your father just won the Academy Award. I'm going to have to insist on some respect from your guinea pig.

When you're writing a movie or a play and writing isn't going well, which is for me the normal condition - it's an exceptional day when suddenly I've got something and it's going well - you can call the studio or the producer or whoever is waiting for it and say, "I know I said I was going to have it in by the end of the summer.

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.

I don't want to analyze myself or anything, but I think, in fact I know this to be true, that I enter the world through what I write. I grew up believing, and continue to believe, that I am a screw-up, that growing up with my family and friends, I had nothing to offer in any conversation. But when I started writing, suddenly there was something that I brought to the party that was at a high-enough level.

Toby: All right. It couldn't have gone far, right? Sam: No. Toby: Somewhere in this building...is our talent.

There are television critics, movie critics, and theater critics too who I like and who I follow and I get genuinely bummed when they don't like something that I've written because I usually agree with them.

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.

I'd been concerned all along that the character of the president in the West Wing pilot would throw the ensemble out of whack, that that character would simply take up all the oxygen in a room. I wanted to hold off bringing this character in until the last possible moment.

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.

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.

Make no mistake about it, you are dumb. You’re a group of incredibly well-educated dumb people. I was there. We all were there. You’re barely functional. 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 the screw-ups, they’re a-coming for ya. It’s a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.

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.

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.

This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your fifteen minutes are up.