Top 188 Quotes & Sayings by Aaron Sorkin - Page 3

There are no Asian movie stars

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.

I don't have personal experience and knowledge about anything but theater. I've been tutored very well on the subject, but ultimately I'm going back to the rules of drama. There are genres that I like as an audience member that I can't write as a writer. I can't write crime, and I like a good thriller as much as anybody.

Larry David called me and said, "You can never watch The West Wing again. Either the show is going to be great without you and you're going to be miserable, or the show is going to be less than great without you and you're going to be miserable." So I had them send a tape of the first episode that I didn't do. I put it in the VCR and I don't think I got 15 seconds in before I leapt up and slammed it off! It felt like I was watching somebody make out with my girlfriend. I've never seen a West Wing episode in seasons five, six or seven.

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.

We lead the world in only 3 categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies. Now none of this is the fault of 20 year old college student, but you nonetheless are without a doubt a member of the worst period generation period ever period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world I don't know what the f...k you're talking about.

Decisions are made by those who show up. Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world.

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.

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

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.

I 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.

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

The Monica Lewinsky scandal was happening at the very time I was writing the West Wing pilot and it was hard, at least for Americans, to look at the White House and think of anything but a punch line. Plus a show about politics, a show that took place in Washington, had just never worked before in American television. So the show was delayed for a year.

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

It was hard saying goodbye to the character and harder saying goodbye to the actor. When rumours started going around that Rob Lowe might be leaving I got an email from Josh Malina asking if I'd be interested in an actor who was cheaper and not as good looking. I wrote back, "Always", and that was that.

I don’t believe there are two sides to every argument. I think the facts are the center. And watching the news abandon the facts in favor of “fairness” is what’s troubling to me.

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.

The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one - America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.

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.

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

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

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

Elite is not a bad word, it's an aspirational one.

Conflict, when used as a device, makes for good television and bad journalism.

To use a basketball metaphor, West Wing cast was a group that liked to pass as much as they liked to shoot.

I think that if I couldn't write, I would be unemployable.

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.

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

I wrote the show West Wing for the two years before and the two years after 9/11. Suddenly everyone in the world had been through something that our characters had not been through; the whole trajectory of the world had changed. Yet our show took place in a parallel universe. I wasn't really sure what to do about this. In no one's wildest dreams did it occur that an event like this could possibly happen.

Television from its inception had the number one goal to alienate as few people as possible. That's why if you look at 1950s, 1960s American sitcoms, the characters don't live any place in particular, religion is never discussed, politics is never discussed, you never really know what anyone's job is; nothing that could make these people seem different from you is ever discussed.

The thing I know how to do most is write a play. I came up loving plays and learning about plays and writing plays. I actually feel like an outsider when I'm writing movies and television.

Just to clarify the division of labor on the show, I write the show and Alan [Poul] does everything else.

It's certainly easy for me to make a fictional character mad about something. I can get them angry about something that I'm relatively indifferent about, just because I'm not educated on it, if I go to someone who is educated about it and is passionate about it. I find a point of fiction and then give it to them.

I'm sick of girls who don't know how to high-five.

What's interesting, is that I've found that the more accomplished a director is, the more secure they are in giving direction that sounds incredibly unsophisticated.

I'm a playwright. All I care about is the play being good.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor. I was acting in all the school plays. I went to school for acting. I was really sure that that's what I wanted to do.

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.

I do enjoy the fact that we don't have a king or queen; we have a person with a very unusual temp job for a few years. My favorite moments on the show were always showing the intersection of the person and the job. Any time Bartlet from the West Wing could be something other than the president - a father, or a husband, or a son, or a friend.

My preference would have been to not go back on the air after 9\11, at all until the time felt right but that wasn't an option.

As 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.

I got into dialogue because my parents began taking me to see plays from when I was very young. Too young, often, to understand the play I was watching: Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf when I was nine years old; That Championship Season when I was ten years old. But I loved the sound of dialogue; it sounded like music to me and I wanted to imitate that sound.

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.

Never argue with a drunk or a fool.

When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that's not going to be me.

Pretty much up until The West Wing, our leaders had always been portrayed in popular culture as either Machiavellian or dolts. But I thought, "What if we show a group of people who are highly competent, they're going to lose as much as they win, but we're going to understand that they wake up every morning wanting to do good?" That was really the spirit behind The West Wing.

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.

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

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.

If I get an idea for a series that I really like, I'm sure I won't be able to resist coming back and doing it.

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.

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

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

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.

The stuff that I write doesn't work very well as background music. You have to watch it from beginning to end and pay attention as if you were watching a play.

I had never thought of doing television. But my agent wanted me to meet John Wells, who had had a lot of success producing ER and China Beach. The night before the meeting, some friends were over for dinner and Akiva Goldsman and I slipped downstairs to the basement so we could sneak a cigarette. He said, "You know what would make a good television series? That." And he was pointing at The American President poster. He said, "There doesn't have to be a romance, just focus on a senior staffer."

I don't think I write differently when I'm writing a screenplay, as opposed to a stage play or a teleplay. Maybe if I were in a film class and there was time to think about it, we could point out differences.

It wouldn't kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.

I would love for people to think that I am as quick, clever, smart and heroic as the characters that I write, but those characters are characters.

And a wheat thin the size of Lake Tahoe.