Decisions are made by those who show up.
Aaron Sorkin
Don't ever forget that a small group of thoughtful people can change the world, it's the only thing that ever has.
Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.
I am all for everyone having a voice; I just don't think everyone has earned the microphone. And that's what the Internet has done.
As long as you keep one foot in the real world while the other foot's in a fairy tale, that fairy tale is going to seem kind of attainable.
It seems to me that more and more we've come to expect less and less from each other, and I think that should change.
I'm more comfortable writing traditional protagonists. But 'Steve Jobs' and 'The Social Network' have antiheroes. I like to write antiheroes as if they're making their case to God about why they should be allowed into heaven. I have to find something in that character that is like me and write to that.
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.
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 think socializing on the Internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.
I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white, and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time, but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent, and I'm not your mommy; I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like.
I'm very physical. When I'm writing, I'm playing all the parts; I'm saying the lines out loud, and if I get excited about something - which doesn't happen very often when I'm writing, but it's the greatest feeling when it does - I'll be out of the chair and walking around, and if I'm at home, I'll find myself two blocks from my house.
The first thing I wrote was a one-act play that got accepted at a one-act play festival, and I was in it along with Nathan Lane and a couple of other very good actors.
The rules are all in a sixty-four-page pamphlet by Aristotle called 'Poetics.' It was written almost three thousand years ago, but I promise you, if something is wrong with what you're writing, you've probably broken one of Aristotle's rules.
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.
Our responsibility is to captivate you for however long we've asked for your attention. That said, there is tremendous drama to be gotten from the great, what you would say, heavy issues.
Trying to guess what the (mass) audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.
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.
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.
I get the 'The New York Times' and 'Los Angeles Times' thrown at my door every morning. I'll read the front page of 'The New York Times,' then the op-eds, then scan the arts section and then the sports section. Then I do the same with the 'L.A. Times.'
I find television, and particularly live television, very romantic: the idea that there is this small group of people, way up high, in a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan, beaming this signal out into the night.
There really isn't a story that you can't tell inside of it. It's very much a clearinghouse for anything that goes on in the world. So you're not at all limited.
I spend most of my days pacing around, muttering that I have no ideas, feeling like I'm walking a plank.
The properties of people and the properties of character have almost nothing to do with each other. They really don't. I know it seems like they do because we look alike, but people don't speak in dialogue. Their lives don't unfold in a series of scenes that form a narrative arc.
When we were doing 'The West Wing,' the hardest thing about doing 'The West Wing' was being compared to yourself. You go out there and want every episode to be as good as your best episode. I wrote 88 episodes of 'The West Wing,' and when you do that, one of them is going to be your 88th best, so your 88th best better be pretty good.
'Molly's Game' was a true story about a remarkable young woman named Molly Bloom. She was this close to going to the Olympics; she was ranked third in North America in women's moguls.
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.
When I create a TV show, it's so that I can write it. I'm not an empire builder; my writing staff is usually a combination of two kinds of people - experts in the world the show is set in, and young writers who will not be unhappy if they're not writing scripts.
Any time you get two people in a room who disagree about anything, the time of day, there is a scene to be written. That's what I look for.
If the characters on 'The West Wing' were watching a TV show wherein a character like Trump was leading in the polls, they wouldn't find it believable.
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.
You know, one of the things I like about this world, or at least I like about the way we're presenting this world, is these issues are terribly complicated - not nearly as black and white as we're led to believe.
A song in a musical works best when a character has to sing - when words won't do the trick anymore. The same idea applies to a long speech in a play or a movie or on television. You want to force the character out of a conversational pattern.
There are some screw-ups headed your way. I wish I could tell you that there was a trick to avoiding the screw-ups... but they're coming for ya. It's a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.
I have a big problem with people who glamorize dumbness and demonize education and intellect. And I'm giving a pretty good description of Sarah Palin right now.
Whether it's 'The West Wing' or anything else, my first thought is always, 'What's a good story?'
The Internet, in general, I find troubling. The anonymity has made us all meaner and dumber. This thing that was supposed to bring us closer together, I see it doing the opposite.
I feel like the better version of myself is on paper... I'd rather have people know me on paper.
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've always thought that there is a great female James Bond movie to be done. I'm not literally calling her Jane Bond, I mean, but a female secret agent.
I've loved every minute I've spent in television. And I've had much more failure, as traditionally measured, than success in television. I've done four shows, and only one of them was the 'West Wing.'
Writing never comes easy. The difference between Page 2 and Page Nothing is the difference between life and death.
Television is a visual medium. You have to create some kind of visual interest. And it's entertainment for your eyes.
The upside of web-based journalism is that everybody gets a chance. The downside is that everybody gets a chance.
When I wrote 'The West Wing,' the juice behind it was that in popular culture, our leaders in government are generally portrayed as Machiavellian, or as idiots. I thought, well, how about writing about a group of hyper-competent people?
I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.
All my heroes wore coats and ties to work. What happened to men wearing hats? Maybe I should bring back hats.
And my friends, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue.
Don't try to guess what it is people want and give it to them. Don't ask for a show of hands. Try your best to write what you like, what you think your friends would like and what you think your father would like and then cross your fingers... The most valuable thing you have is your own voice.
