Aaron Sorkin quotes
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“Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day. Civility, respect, kindness, character.”
-- Aaron SorkinSource : "20 famous college commencement speeches" by Mo Elinzano, www.deseretnews.com. May 6, 2015.
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“My resting pulse as a writer is writing idealistically and romantically; aspirationally. My taste lies in quixotic heroes.”
-- Aaron Sorkin -
“Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.”
-- Aaron SorkinSource : Aaron Sorkin (2003). “The West Wing: Seasons 3 & 4 : the Shooting Scripts”, Newmarket Shooting Scripts
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“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.”
-- Aaron SorkinSource : Source: www.esquire.com
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“The real problem with all drugs is that they work. Fantastically. They're great, right up until the moment they kill you.”
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“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 SorkinSource : Source: www.rollingstone.com
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“If you close your eyes you can imagine the hackers sitting in a room, combing through the documents to find the ones that will draw the most blood. And in a room next door are American journalists doing the same thing. As demented and criminal as it is, at least the hackers are doing it for a cause. The press is doing it for a nickel.”
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“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.”
-- Aaron Sorkin -
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“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.”
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“Decisions are made by those who show up.”
-- Aaron SorkinSource : Aaron Sorkin (2002). “The West Wing”
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“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.”
-- Aaron Sorkin -
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“An artist’s job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.”
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“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 -
“If you feel that strongly about something, you have an obligation to try and change my mind.”
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“When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that's not going to be me.”
-- Aaron Sorkin -
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“You're going to fall down, but the world doesn't care how many times you fall down, as long as it's one fewer than the numbers of times you get back up.”
-- Aaron SorkinSource : "Remarks by Aaron Sorkin ’83 at Syracuse University’s 158th Commencement and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry’s 115th Commencement". Aaron Sorkin's Commencement address at Syracuse University in New York, news.syr.edu. May 13, 2012.
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“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.”
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“Stupid people surround themselves with smart people. Smart people surround themselves with smart people who disagree with them.”
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“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 -
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“Roxy Sorkin, your father just won the Academy Award. I'm going to have to insist on some respect from your guinea pig.”
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“A friend is somebody who says the same things to your face that they would say if you're not in the room.”
-- Aaron SorkinSource : "Aaron Sorkin: What I've Learned" by Cal Fussman, www.esquire.com. December 14, 2010.
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“We live in a world that has walls and those walls need to be guarded by men with guns.”
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“Writers are opposite of athletes, they get better with age”
-- Aaron Sorkin -
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“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.”
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“Toby: All right. It couldn't have gone far, right? Sam: No. Toby: Somewhere in this building...is our talent.”
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“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.”
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“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 -
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“Mrs. Landingham, does the President have free time this morning? The President has nothing but free time, Toby. Right now he's in the residence eating Cheerios and enjoying Regis and Kathie Lee. Should I get him for you? Sarcasm's a disturbing thing coming from a woman of your age, Mrs. Landingham. What age would that be, Toby? Late twenties? Atta boy.”
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“Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word 'census,' and people fall asleep.”
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“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 -
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“Music is what mathematics does on a Saturday night.”
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“This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your fifteen minutes are up.”
-- Aaron Sorkin -
“It's a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.”
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“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 -
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“Government should be a place where people can come together, and no one gets left behind. No one…gets left behind. An instrument of good.”
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“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.”
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“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 SorkinSource : "The Newsroom". www.npr.org. July 16, 2012.
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“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.”
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“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,”
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“Rule of storytelling: When a character is shoved against a wall, shove them against a wall harder.”
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“It wouldn't kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.”
-- Aaron Sorkin -
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“It's nice that HBO is in business with the audience and not with the advertisers. There's a difference.”
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“Socializing on the internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.”
-- Aaron SorkinSource : Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.
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“Trying to guess what the (mass) audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.”
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“Elite is not a bad word, it's an aspirational one”
-- Aaron Sorkin -
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“Toby Zeigler: There's literally no one in the world I don't hate right now.”
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“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.”
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“A hero would die for his country, but he'd much rather live for it.”
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“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 -
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“You can only write, 'Somebody wants something, something else is in their way of getting it.'”
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“She's a person; the doctor pronounces her dead, not the news.”
-- Aaron Sorkin -
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“Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt.”
-- Aaron SorkinSource : Aaron Sorkin's Commencement Address at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York, news.syr.edu. May 13, 2012.
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“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.”
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“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 SorkinSource : "Actor Michael Emerson". "The Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. May 16, 2012.
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“I’m sick of girls who don’t know how to high-five,”
-- Aaron Sorkin -
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“It's important to remember that, first and foremost, if not only, this is entertainment. 'The West Wing' isn't meant to be good for you.”
-- Aaron SorkinSource : "Meet the Press" with Chuck Todd, www.nbcnews.com. July 3, 2016.
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“I'm not interested in the difference between good and bad, I'm interested in the differences between good and great.”
-- Aaron Sorkin -
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“People who don't know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn.”
-- 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.”
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“Film doesn't have to worry. Movies are awesome. There's no war going on, theaters aren't going to lose.”
-- Aaron Sorkin -
“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.”
-- Aaron Sorkin -
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“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 -
“Tell me what you think and then tell me what the really smart person in the room who disagrees with you thinks.”
-- Aaron Sorkin -
“Decisions are made by those who show up. Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world.”
-- Aaron Sorkin
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