Aaron Sorkin Quotes

I think my goal is not even with celebrities. I love celebrities, but my goal is to walk down the street and just see people wearing my stuff - that is the goal!

If you kill a character people feel sad. That's too easy.

The most stressful and difficult part of steering a large movie is that you are taking on the responsibility of communicating with a very wide audience. You can't ever hide behind the notion of, 'Okay, they just don't get it,' or, 'Certain people just don't get it.' You have to be mindful of the size of your audience, and you have to communicate in a way that lets them in.

Television series always have a lot of characters because you want people to identify with someone on the show, who will be your eyes.

Everybody wants a big crowd. You get amazed sometimes with certain things that millions of people are watching and you go, "Serious?! Really?!" And then, there are things that you really, really enjoy and not a lot of people are watching. It's very, very hard to predict how it works.

I think commercial success is really important. It means there are more people listening, and you're affecting the zeitgeist more. If only a hundred people know you exist, it's harder to get your message across.

As an actor, you really want to resonate with your audience. I played a character on Oz and people still approach me in the streets today.

You need to find a way to propel this creativity to the masses. People get brainwashed and they start to forget what's good.

I should watch network television, or daytime television, because I'm not sure who all these people are who keep getting referred to in blogs and newspapers. I better get myself culturally attuned.

America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.

I am of the generation of writers who can get instant feedback from readers within hours of publication. The fan forum is extraordinary - readers from all over the world coming together to discuss, argue and debate scenes and characters from a novel. They add a layer to the story that I cannot write and yes, I will participate in that conversation and answer questions. After all, they are the people I'm writing for and their enthusiasm and questions really pushes me to raise the bar.

Until a character becomes a personality it cannot be believed. Without personality, the character may do funny or interesting things, but unless people are able to identify themselves with the character, its actions will seem unreal. And without personality, a story cannot ring true to the audience.

Fashion is always silly, for, before it can spread far, it must be calculated for silly people; as examples of sense, wit, or ingenuity could be imitated only by a few.

Film is such a powerful medium. It can really affect change; you can affect so many different people in different ways.

In 1996 or 1997, out of nowhere, Fox News comes on and it's on channel 360 on Direct TV, and out of 300 million Americans, on every single night, anywhere from 3 to 5 million watch it, we're talking about at no more than 2 percent of the American public is watching Fox at any given moment. Yet, ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the institutional left, CNN, MSNBC, the record companies, Hollywood, all seem to be committed towards aligning their minds and their money and their other resources to try to shut up Fox News.

The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.

We have audiences that seem to be embracing whether they've heard of the characters or not.

They're all gonna be considered kooks and freaks and so forth. My point here is that many in the Drive-By Media, the faces that you see (sigh), they're just are repeating what's presented to them. They're repeating what they hear when they talk to other like-minded people.

A lot of things that people think are risky, I don't think are risky. I don't get all that. I think what was really risky for network television was to let cable television to take the summers.

The thing I always guard against when I'm talking to people I'm working with about a script is that there's a thing I don't like and it's called "talk story." It's when you're talking about the story; the characters are tasked with talking about the story instead of allowing the audience to experience the story.

Trying to find a human side to the character is a way to give them a chance to have people like them.

To be honest, my goal is very clear. It's to have many people listen to my music. I want to confirm my existence even more by standing on a large stage.

Even in the tragedies, Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools. He puts in certain middle-range characters. And when you go to the Globe, you realize how that all works. The people who paid more sat in seats around the edge. Everybody else paid a penny. They put it into a tin box - that's why we call it the "box office." They stood in the pit, but they were very close, so when Hamlet was doing his soliloquy, it was addressed to you, the audience - right there.

Artists tend to be people of strong character and opinion. Often they are dismissed in our culture if they don't fit a certain mainstream media mold. It's a reason why filmmakers are now releasing films online. Art, in any form can invoke various emotions and actions. I think some can be frightened of the power that a simple image can invoke and that's why they tend to shy away from it. But art documents moments in our history and that image is often what many people remember of a certain time.

Mass delusion is the result of the effort. Propaganda is one of the techniques. But it mentioned things like you create a consensus of something that's totally absurd. You get people believing something totally absurd, however that's done, and then the people with common sense come along and say, "No, no, no. That's totally wrong," and they end up being the new kooks and weirdos. They are the ones society thinks are cockeyed and weird.