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 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
Our responsibility is to captivate you for however long we’ve asked for your attention. That said, there is tremendous drama to be gotten from the great, what you would say, heavy issues. – 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
As long as you keep one foot in the real world while the other foot’s in a fairy tale, that fairy tale is going to seem kind of attainable. – Aaron Sorkin
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
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
‘Steve Jobs’ is my seventh movie. I believe, if you added them up, I don’t think there is more than a total of 10 minutes that takes place in a person’s home. They’re all in offices, courtrooms, laboratories, things like that. – Aaron Sorkin
There have been times – and not just on ‘The Newsroom,’ but on ‘The West Wing,’ ‘Sports Night,’ ‘Studio 60’… – where it was hard to look the cast and crew in the eye, when I put a script on the table that I knew just wasn’t good enough. – Aaron Sorkin
I feel like the better version of myself is on paper… I’d rather have people know me on paper. – Aaron Sorkin
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. – Aaron Sorkin
I’ve loved every minute I’ve spent in television. And I’ve had much more failure, as traditionally measured, than success in television. I’ve done four shows, and only one of them was the ‘West Wing.’ – Aaron Sorkin
I had a lot of survival jobs. One was for the Witty Ditty singing-telegram company. I was in the red-and-white stripes with the straw boater hat and kazoo. Balloons. Even when you’re sleeping on a friend’s couch, you have to pay some kind of rent. – 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 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
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. – Aaron Sorkin
My parents took me to see plays, starting from when I was very little. Oftentimes, I was too young to understand. I don’t know what my parents were thinking – ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’ when I was eight years old, that kind of thing. So lots of times, I didn’t understand what was going on, but I just loved the sound of dialogue. – Aaron Sorkin
If I am writing a movie and I am stuck, I can call the studio and tell them it’s delayed. You can’t do that with television – you have air dates to meet. – Aaron Sorkin
Heroes in drama are people who try hard to reach a virtuous ideal. And whether they succeed or fail really doesn’t matter – it’s the trying that counts. – Aaron 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
I have all of the Apple products. Everything I’ve ever written, I’ve written on a Mac. My first computer, my roommates and I chipped in, and we got that first Macintosh – 128K. It had as much memory as a greeting card that plays music. – Aaron Sorkin
I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue. – Aaron Sorkin
It’s nice that HBO is in business with the audience and not with the advertisers. There’s a difference. – Aaron Sorkin
I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate. – 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 am uncomfortable talking about the things that I write. It seems unseemly to me. I have no problem at all when I see anybody else talking about the same project, but I feel my work should speak for itself. – Aaron Sorkin
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. – Aaron Sorkin