Aaron Sorkin
Aaron Sorkin
Aaron Benjamin Sorkin is an American screenwriter, producer, and playwright. His works include the Broadway plays A Few Good Men and The Farnsworth Invention; the television series Sports Night, The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and The Newsroom; and the films A Few Good Men, The American President, Charlie Wilson's War, The Social Network, Moneyball, and Steve Jobs...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth9 June 1961
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Aaron Sorkin quotes about
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.
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.
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.
With a television series, there's a hard deadline, and so you have to write even when you're not writing well.
I think it's up to writers to write stuff that is compelling enough that people want to watch.
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.
One of the biggest challenges in the past for me in working on the networks was that audiences have grown accustomed to television being something that keeps you company-background music, something that you have on while you're flipping through a magazine, cooking dinner, talking on the phone, putting the kids to bed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just to clarify the division of labor on the show, I write the show and Alan [Poul] does everything else.
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.