Aaron Sorkin Quotes

I started in theater and I wanted to write plays, but I never really found an original voice as a playwright.

Writers love to write those idiotic, long stage directions, and some of them worse than others. They have nothing to do with the movie. They're just jerking around.

I fell into writing plays by accident. But the reason I write plays is that it's the only thing I'm any good at.

It's funny how that comes up, because sometimes I'll write something and I'll think, I don't know if that's a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays - they feel very theatrical to me.

I love acting. I love play-acting. I love pretending. I love telling stories so whether they be comedic or serious or whatever, it doesn't really matter to me. I enjoy telling a good story. I have it all in me.

Once in a while there were things in screenwriting that taught me things for fiction. But there's nothing in screenwriting that teaches you anything for the theater. I'm not sure I've ever fully appreciated before how different a form theater is.

If you're a playwright, unless you're really lacking in get-up-and-go, you can always get your play up somewhere. You can't necessarily make a living doing it, but theater is about meeting an audience. Plays are not easier to write necessarily, they take less time to write. If you get them up, it's a much more rough-and-tumble kind of existence. I think it's, from my perspective, easier than novel writing.

The whole thrust of theatre is different, just because the writing is so much more respected in a play. Whereas in movies - and having been the writer, I can say from experience - the writer is lower down on the food chain.

I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.

Please God, I hope my experience in downtown theater isn't over, because I'd love to keep making weird plays. I can't wait for Charles Isherwood to call my next play 'sit-com-y' and tell me to stick to writing television.

I'd always fantasized about writing a new play. Even when I had all this success in television, what I was daydreaming about in my dressing room is that one day I would do it.

I write plays instinctively. I don't like writing movie scripts.

I love television, and my love for it has made me curious about writing it. It feels like television's moving toward something more novelistic, and that's what I started wanting to do. But I can't say that I'm dying to get notes from a studio. The artistic control that you get as a playwright is worth its weight in gold.

I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.

I began writing for theater, and maybe because of that I've always thought of myself as a theater writer who does work in film sometimes.

As a dramatist, I don't have politics.

The truth is you don't like the theater except the times when you're in a room by yourself putting the play on paper.

I have worked with Tarell Alvin McCraney, who is the play Moonlight is based on. He's a company member at Steppenwolf. I have done a could of his plays here.

You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.

I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

When you come to actually act, it's a game. It may be a very serious game, but it's still a game. If you lose that sense of play, the work suffers.

When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions -- that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride.

To write, you have to know how to act and know about directing. To act, you also need to know how to write and direct.

I also write plays, so I understand the writers mind, and how obsessed you can get writing.

I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do, then go ahead and do it with ease.