Aaron Sorkin Quotes
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Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.
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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.
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I'm not on Facebook, and I don't tweet, but I know plenty of people who love both.
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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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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.
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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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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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I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue.
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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.
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I like writing idealistically, romantically and swashbucklingly.
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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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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.
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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.
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And my friends, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
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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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I'm neither a millennial nor a hipster.
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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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I'm not sophisticated when it comes to politics, when it comes to journalism.
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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.
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I get the 'The New York Times' and 'Los Angeles Times' thrown at my door every morning. I'll read the front page of 'The New York Times,' then the op-eds, then scan the arts section and then the sports section. Then I do the same with the 'L.A. Times.'
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Writing never comes easy. The difference between Page 2 and Page Nothing is the difference between life and death.
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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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Whether it's 'The West Wing' or anything else, my first thought is always, 'What's a good story?'
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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.