Best Sorkin Quotes & Sayings

Elite is not a bad word, it's an aspirational one — Aaron Sorkin

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

Only criminals and adulterers should have to hide who they are. — Aaron Sorkin

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. — 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

I'm more comfortable writing traditional protagonists. But 'Steve Jobs' and 'The Social Network' have antiheroes. I like to write antiheroes as if they're making their case to God about why they should be allowed into heaven. I have to find something in that character that is like me and write to that. — Aaron Sorkin

Don't tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing. — Aaron Sorkin

Aaron Sorkin is why people hate liberals. He's a smug, condescending know-it-all who isn't as smart as he thinks he is. — Alex Pareene

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

My experience on 'The West Wing' was, I think, now rare in that I was pretty young, and I walked into this environment where Aaron Sorkin was giving me a script every week, and Thomas Schlamme and John Wells were keeping the studio off my back, at least as best as they could. — Alex Graves

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. — Aaron Sorkin

Film doesn't have to worry. Movies are awesome. There's no war going on, theaters aren't going to lose. — Aaron Sorkin

Good writers borrow. The best writers steal. — Aaron Sorkin

Liberals could live their whole lives never having to hear an actual conservative opinion other than the idiotic arguments written for conservative characters on Aaron Sorkin's little teleplays. — Ann Coulter

In truth, the best Bitcoin can hope for is to be a second-rate version of gold, if that. — Andrew Ross Sorkin

If the characters on 'The West Wing' were watching a TV show wherein a character like Trump was leading in the polls, they wouldn't find it believable. — Aaron Sorkin

The guy who wins the Oscar for Best Actor has a much higher bar to clear than the woman who wins best actress. — Aaron Sorkin

I don't think I ever got the hang of the writers' room. I love collaborating with people, but I really do my best work alone, and I think I would want to - if I did something again, I think I'd want to take total ownership the way Aaron Sorkin or David Kelley does. — Diablo Cody

Though Moneyball had the talents of screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin going for it, they weren't baseball insiders. — Brad Pitt

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. — Aaron Sorkin

The numbers were, at best, guesstimates, and all three men knew it. The relevant figure would ultimately be the one that represented the most they could possibly ask from Congress without raising too many questions. Whatever that sum turned out to be, they knew they could count on (Interim Assistant Secretary of the Treasury) Kashkari to perform some sort of mathematical voodoo to justify it: — Andrew Ross Sorkin

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. — Aaron Sorkin

A song in a musical works best when a character has to sing - when words won't do the trick anymore. The same idea applies to a long speech in a play or a movie or on television. You want to force the character out of a conversational pattern. — Aaron Sorkin

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. — 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

My way of getting the best from people on a set is to notice their work, to make every prop master, every seamstress, part of 'The Newsroom' or 'The West Wing' or 'Steve Jobs.' — Aaron Sorkin

Everybody knows Aaron Sorkin's scripts. There's a huge amount of lines. There's a huge amount of interchange. You gotta do a lot of learning to be able to get it up to pace. — Danny Boyle

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

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

Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes. We need gigantic revolutionary changes ... Competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be getting six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge for its citizens, just like national defense.
Sam Seaborne, West Wing — Aaron Sorkin

In many ways, education is a lousy business. Teachers are not normal economic actors; almost all of them work for less money than they might fetch in some other industry, given their skills and advanced degrees. — Andrew Ross Sorkin

I have a big problem with people who glamorize dumbness and demonize education and intellect. And I'm giving a pretty good description of Sarah Palin right now. — Aaron Sorkin

In truth, in the fairy-tale version of bailing out Lehman, the next domino, A.I.G., would have fallen even harder. If the politics of bailing out Lehman were bad, the politics of bailing out A.I.G. would have been worse. And the systemic risk that a failure of A.I.G. posed was orders of magnitude greater than Lehman's collapse. — Andrew Ross Sorkin

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. — Aaron Sorkin

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. — Aaron Sorkin

You trashed the law. But we understand. You're permitted. You have a greater responsibility than we can possibly fathom. You provide us with a blanket of freedom. We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns, and nothing's gonna stand in your way of doing it. Not Willy Santiago, not Dawson and Downey, not a thousand armies, not the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and not the Constitution of the United States. That's the truth, isn't it Colonel? I can handle it. — 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

The moment a large investor doesn't believe a government will pay back its debt when it says it will, a crisis of confidence could develop. Investors have scant patience for the years of good governance - politically fraught fiscal restructuring, austerity and debt rescheduling - it takes to defuse a sovereign-debt crisis. — Andrew Ross Sorkin

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

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. — Aaron Sorkin

Investors are sometimes too busy looking for profits to notice where the truth ends and the deception begins. — Andrew Ross 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

As a dramatist, you're looking for points of friction ... — 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

I think Aaron Sorkin is like Shakespeare. When you go through it, there is a rhythm and clues all over the place of how it should be played. — Chris Messina

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

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

Just to clarify the division of labor on the show, I write the show and Alan [Poul] does everything else. — 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'm a registered Republican, I only seem liberal because I believe that hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not gay marriage. — Aaron Sorkin

You are like seven of the strangest women I have ever met. — Aaron Sorkin

Whether it's 'The West Wing' or anything else, my first thought is always, 'What's a good story?' — Aaron Sorkin

She's a person; the doctor pronounces her dead, not the news. — 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