Just to clarify the division of labor on the show, I write the show and Alan [Poul] does everything else.
AARON SORKINI think it’s up to writers to write stuff that is compelling enough that people want to watch.
More Aaron Sorkin Quotes
-
-
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 -
To use a basketball metaphor, West Wing cast was a group that liked to pass as much as they liked to shoot.
AARON SORKIN -
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.
AARON SORKIN -
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 -
If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.
AARON SORKIN -
I like workplace shows and White House was a very glamorous workplace to set a show in; it appealed to a sense of romanticism and idealism that I have.
AARON SORKIN -
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 -
Only criminals and adulterers should have to hide who they are.
AARON SORKIN -
Toby Zeigler: There’s literally no one in the world I don’t hate right now.
AARON SORKIN -
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 -
Writers are opposite of athletes, they get better with age
AARON SORKIN -
Conflict, when used as a device, makes for good television and bad journalism.
AARON SORKIN -
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 -
And a wheat thin the size of Lake Tahoe.
AARON SORKIN -
Helen 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 SORKIN -
My resting pulse as a writer is writing idealistically and romantically; aspirationally. My taste lies in quixotic heroes.
AARON SORKIN -
People who don’t know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn.
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 -
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 -
The 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 -
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 -
I’m terribly afraid of failure. When your identity is wrapped up in writing and you’ve written something that doesn’t work, it’s a tough pill to swallow.
AARON SORKIN -
When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that’s not going to be me.
AARON SORKIN -
My 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 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 -
As a dramatist, you’re looking for points of friction.
AARON SORKIN