Top 90 Aaron Sorkin Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “When I feel that something I’m writing is going well, everything in my life is good and the things in my life that aren’t good are completely manageable. If it’s not going well, Miss America could be standing there in a swimsuit handing me a nobel price and I wouldn’t be happy about it.”

— Aaron Sorkin

52. “People who don’t know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn.”

— Aaron Sorkin

53. “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.”

— Aaron Sorkin

54. “My resting pulse as a writer is writing idealistically and romantically; aspirationally. My taste lies in quixotic heroes.”

— Aaron Sorkin

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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 Sorkin

58. “We have a natural resentment toward government, which was how we were born.”

— Aaron Sorkin

59. “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.”

— Aaron Sorkin

60. “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

61. “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

62. “I’ll get cast occasionally as sort of the jerk version of myself, and I have fun doing that. But it’s really better for everyone if I stay behind the camera.”

— Aaron Sorkin

63. “You don’t need to wear a patch on your arm to have honor.”

— Aaron Sorkin

64. “Oratory should raise your heart rate. Oratory should blow the doors off the place.”

— Aaron Sorkin

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

— Aaron Sorkin

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

— Aaron Sorkin

67. “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

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

— Aaron Sorkin

69. “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

70. “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.”

— Aaron Sorkin

71. “It’s an election year. We would prefer that voters didn’t use common sense.”

— Aaron Sorkin

72. “It’s one thing to be asked to respect someone else’s religion. It’s another to be asked to respect their taboos.”

— Aaron Sorkin

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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.”

— Aaron Sorkin

76. “I want to convey that I’m crazy about the Kardashians – but I’m not sure which is which.”

— Aaron Sorkin

77. “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

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

— Aaron Sorkin

79. “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

80. “I think that if I couldn’t write, I would be unemployable.”

— Aaron Sorkin

81. “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

82. “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.”

— Aaron Sorkin

83. “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.”

— Aaron Sorkin

84. “That’s a very real feeling – that I don’t have a story to tell. I’m not a pure storyteller. I have a tough time with story.”

— Aaron Sorkin

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

— Aaron Sorkin

86. “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.”

— Aaron Sorkin

87. “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.”

— Aaron Sorkin

88. “You know you really don’t need a forensic team to get to the bottom of this.”

— Aaron Sorkin

89. “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.”

— Aaron Sorkin

90. “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.”

— Aaron Sorkin

91. “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

92. “I’m a playwright. All I care about is the play being good.”

— Aaron Sorkin

93. “I’ve never met anyone who has said, “My goal is to make America mediocre.” That’s a kind of hard-right conservative fallacy.”

— Aaron Sorkin