Quotes from Aaron Sorkin

I'm neither a millennial nor a hipster.

And my friends, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

The upside of web-based journalism is that everybody gets a chance. The downside is that everybody gets a chance.

The real problem with all drugs is that they work. Fantastically. They're great, right up until the moment they kill you.

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.

While I was doing 'The Newsroom,' I always had the news on on different networks on different TVs around my house and around my office.

Writers are opposite of athletes, they get better with age

Not all paintings are abstract; they're not all Jackson Pollock. There's value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.

I'm terribly afraid of failure. When your identity is wrapped up in writing and you've written something that doesn't work, it's a tough pill to swallow.

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.

I do not speak through my characters; it's not a ventriloquist act.

I feel like the better version of myself is on paper... I'd rather have people know me on paper.

It's nice that HBO is in business with the audience and not with the advertisers. There's a difference.

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.

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.

I get nervous before openings or premieres or when someone's reading a new script, and I get nervous when my daughter isn't in my immediate field of vision.

Roxy Sorkin, your father just won the Academy Award. I'm going to have to insist on some respect from your guinea pig.

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