Daily Inspiration Quote by Aaron Sorkin

Sorkin’s line lands like a dare, dressed up as confession. “Borrow” sounds polite, the kind of word that keeps the literary neighborhood civilized: you take influence, you give credit, you return the lawnmower. “Steal,” though, is an escalation with swagger. It reframes originality not as pristine invention but as aggressive selection: finding the thing that already works and taking it so completely it becomes inseparable from your own voice.

The intent is partly motivational, partly defensive. Coming from a high-profile producer known for dialogue that’s been praised as musical and attacked as mannered, it reads as a preemptive shrug at accusations of derivativeness. Sorkin’s subtext: everyone’s cribbing; the only sin is doing it timidly. Greatness, in this framing, isn’t moral purity, it’s execution - the confidence to absorb influences so thoroughly they metabolize into something that feels new in the mouth.

Context matters because film and TV writing is a craft industry that openly runs on templates, archetypes, and repeatable beats. In that ecosystem, “stealing” is a backhanded way of blessing the remix: take the engine from Mamet, the velocity from screwball, the idealism from Capra, then rebuild the chassis with contemporary anxieties and a deadline-heavy pace. The line also winks at a long tradition of creators laundering theft into homage - Picasso’s apocryphal “good artists copy…” echoing in the background.

It works because it’s transgressive but practical: permission to stop fetishizing originality and start obsessing over transformation. The real flex isn’t theft; it’s getting away with it by making it feel inevitable.