As a dramatist, you’re looking for points of friction.
AARON SORKINAs a dramatist, you’re looking for points of friction.
AARON SORKINThere’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 SORKINMy preference would have been to not go back on the air after 911, at all until the time felt right but that wasn’t an option.
AARON SORKINAny 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 SORKINI 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.
AARON SORKINI’ve never met anyone who has said, “My goal is to make America mediocre.” That’s a kind of hard-right conservative fallacy.
AARON SORKINWe live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns.
AARON SORKINAs 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 SORKINElite is not a bad word, it’s an aspirational one.
AARON SORKINHelen Mirren and Meryl Streep can play with the boys but there just aren’t that many tour-de-force roles out there for women.
AARON SORKINToby: All right. It couldn’t have gone far, right? Sam: No. Toby: Somewhere in this building…is our talent.
AARON SORKINI consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue. But when I’m writing, the way the words sound is as important to me as what they mean.
AARON SORKINWriting 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.
AARON SORKINI’m sick of girls who don’t know how to high-five.
AARON SORKINTrying to guess what the (mass) audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.
AARON SORKINThe 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.
AARON SORKIN