Blank Paper Quotes & Sayings

Knowing this secret, being the only one chosen to know, makes me feel important in a way. But it's a negative importance, it's the importance of a blank sheet of paper. I can know because I don't count. I feel singled out, but also bereft. — Margaret Atwood

Kevin Keegan said if he had a blank sheet of paper, five names would be on it. — Alvin Martin

Amanda herself couldn't understand why her writing was so different from her own personality. Her pen seemed to take on a life of its own when she sat before a sheaf of blank parchment paper. She wrote about characters unlike any people she had ever known... sometimes violent, brutal, always passionate; some who came to ruin and some who even triumphed in spite of their own lack of morality. Since she had no actual pattern on which to base these fictional characters, Amanda realized that their feelings, their passions, could only have come from inside herself. — Lisa Kleypas

I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too. — Susan Hill

It wasn't until she was about to press Play, just as she was climbing under her covers, that she noticed it, the envelope tucked beneath the edge of her pillow. She frowned as she reached for it, her fingers lingering for only a moment before pulling it free. The plain white envelope was blank, but she suspected who it was from.
She tore the top apart and unfolded the paper inside, her heart fluttering when she recognized the handwriting.

I miss you like crazy.
Jay

Violet grinned. It was just a note - a single line, really - but even his notes made her pulse race. Ridiculous, she thought as she ran her fingertips over his words, committing them to memory. — Kimberly Derting

I turned back to my work and lifted the lid of the last crate.

I sat down. Hard. And stared.

It was filled with paper. Ink. Blank journals.

In one wonderful, horrible moment I knew that I was lost. Keir, Warlord, had taken me, claimed me, made me his warprize. But somewhere, somehow, he had managed to find a way into my heart as well.

How had this happened? I'd given myself to a barbarian, a ravaging, crazed warlord, expecting little more than abuse and dishonor at his hands. But this man had offered nothing but kindness and respect to me, his property. I knew this gift was by his hand, I'd not spoken to Sal about paper or ink, and she'd not understand its importance.

Could he care so much that he paid attention to this tiny detail?

Did he want me to be happy? — Elizabeth Vaughan

Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction. — Thomas Jefferson

The world she was walking through was a pale nothingness, like a blank sheet of paper or an enormous, empty white room. It had no temperature, no smell, no texture and no taste. — Neil Gaiman

The most terrifying thing in my life is a blank sheet of paper. — David Ayer

I am as blank as a piece of white paper in a world with no pencils. — A.S. King

What's the Future? It's a blank sheet of paper, and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held, and the lines we draw aren't the lines we wanted. — John Marsden

I will quote one sentence from this text, namely, the one with which it ended. It was also the sentence which finally dissolved the writer's block that had inhibited the author from starting work. I have since used it whenever I myself have been gripped by fear of the blank sheet in front of me. It is infallible, and its effect is always the same: the knot unravels and a stream of words gushes out on to the virgin paper. It acts like a magic spell and I sometimes fancy it really is one. But, even if it isn't the work of a sorcerer, it is certainly the most brilliant sentence any writer has ever devised. It runs: 'This is where my story begins.' — Walter Moers

That year, and every year, it seemed, we began by studying the Revolutionary War. We were taken in school buses on field trips to visit Plymouth Rock, and to walk the Freedom Trail, and to climb to the top of the Bunker Hill Monument. We made dioramas out of colored construction paper depicting George Washington crossing the choppy waters of the Delaware River, and we made puppets of King George wearing white tights and a black bow in his hair. During tests we were given blank maps of the thirteen colonies, and asked to fill in names, dates, capitals. I could do it with my eyes closed. — Jhumpa Lahiri

If I have a blank piece of paper and I draw a red figure, immediately this brings sounds and shapes to my mind. I tried to make a film in which every component supports the others while giving each other space and stimulating the creation of what's yet to come. — Alex Abreu

I feel much safer faced with a blank sheet of paper than I do with a real person. — Selima Hill

If you're talking to an architect, he can look at a blank piece of paper, and once the initial design is there, the formula kicks in. Each room should have something unique and different about it - much the same way that in a song, every eight bars or so, a new piece of information should be introduced. — Ryan Tedder

I don't know any other lifestyle. I get up in the morning and I really do feel that the world is my oyster, and I start that way, the same as I would if I were preparing to write a song: put a blank piece of paper up on the piano and you go for it. — Lesley Gore

When I wake up in the morning, and I go to the piano, and there's a blank sheet of paper in front of me, by the end of the day, that could be a gold mine. You really do need to wake up and expect that the world is your oyster because it very well may be. — Lesley Gore

As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire. — Hilary Mantel

And that's what got me to the piano, that's what got me up in the morning: a blank piece of paper and a hope to have something by the end of the day. — Lesley Gore

A charming eccentric, a piece of blank paper on which the electorate could write its message: You other guys are so wasted that we decided to elect this fool for two years instead. — Stephen King

My husband and I have always been good at creative visualization. Before we quit drugs and got married he'd place tabs of acid on his eyes to see things that weren't there. I'd lay blank sheets of photographic paper on the cornea of developing solution to conjure images. We'd always coaxed dreams from paper, and believed them. — Jalina Mhyana

My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time. — Cormac McCarthy

We write because the blank piece of paper and the pen are there. We write because this is our addiction and we are proud of it. Our habit, our drug, our crutch. Whatever you wish to call it. We write because since an early age we felt it deep in our souls and in our bones. The poem must be written, the story must be told and the new myths and Gods are waiting for you to bring them forth from out of the darkness and to bring them into the light of being. You are a creator, so create. You are the writer. So write. — R.M. Engelhardt

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper. — John Updike

I was asked the age old question today: why are you an author? I suppose there are lots of answers to this question that would suffice, but for me there is really only one answer that will do: the blank paper taunts me, and I am weak. — Richard Due

It's embarrassing, how much effort it took for me to wear something that looks exactly like a blank piece of paper. — Siobhan Vivian

That's the horrible thing starting out, you get distracted a lot because anything is easier than writing. It's just the same enemy - blank paper. — Jimmy Breslin

Several years ago we had an intern who was none too swift. One day he was typing and turned to a secretary and said, "I'm almost out of typing paper. What do I do?" "Just use copier machine paper," she told him. With that, the intern took his last remaining blank piece of paper, put it on the photocopier and proceeded to make five blank copies. — Dave Barry

Obviously God must guide us in a way that will develop spontaneity in us. The development of character, rather than direction in this, that, and the other matter, must be the primary purpose of the Father. He will guide us, but he won't override us. That fact should make us use with caution the method of sitting down with a pencil and blank sheet of paper to write down the instructions dictated by God for the day. Suppose a parent would dictate to the child minutely everything he is to do during the day. The child would be stunted under that regime. The parent must guide in such a manner, and to the degree, that autonomous character, capable of making right decisions for itself, is produced. God does the same. — E. Stanley Jones

It just feels like meeting him again was like seeing a blank paper ready to be sketched, a different idea to be drawn. — Basma Salem

A blank isn't the same. He remembered holding the book, feeling the history of the leather cover someone had tanned and stretched and cut to fit. The paper that someone had laboriously filled by hand and sewn into the binding. Years, heavy on the pages. Morgan had been reading a copy of it. An original. It felt like the old monk's story was part of his own.
But when he read it in the blank, it was just words, and it had no power to carry him away. — Rachel Caine

Unfortunately, an equally strong negative current - fear - is at work. Fear of writing gets planted in most Americans at an early age, usually at school, and it never entirely goes away. The blank piece of paper or the blank computer screen, waiting to be filled with our wonderful words, can freeze us into not writing any words at all, or writing words that are less than wonderful. — William Zinsser

This is the war where we change. This is the trickster war. It's where we disappear, just like they desire us disappear. I spoke it you before: They wish us blank," he said, gesturing without thinking at Dr. Trefusis, who was the nearest exemplar of the white race. "They want us with no history and no memory. They want us empty as paper so they can write on us, so we ain't nothing but a price and an owner's name and a list of tasks. And that's what we'll give them. We'll give them your Nothing. We'll give them my William Williams and Henry Henry. We'll slip through and we'll change to who we must needs be and I will be all sly and have my delightful picaresque japes. But at the end of it, when it's over, I shall be one thing. I shall be one man, fixed, and not have to take no other name. I shall be one person steadily for some years."
"This is why we got to win ... If we ever wish to be one person, we got to win. — M T Anderson

I'd see him do things that didn't fit with his face or hands, things like painting a picture at OT with real paints on a blank paper with no lines or numbers anywhere on it to tell him where to paint, or like writing letters to somebody in a beautiful flowing hand. How could a man who looked like him paint pictures or write letters to people, or be upset and worried like I saw him once when he got a letter back? — Ken Kesey

Here, too, a brand-new day is beginning. It could be a day like all the others, or it could be a day remarkable enough in many ways to remain in the memory. In either case, for now, for most people, it is a blank sheet of paper. — Haruki Murakami

This was the wonderful thing about strangers. they were big blank pieces of paper, you could draw watever you like on their impresionable surfaces — Janet Fitch

Seven, ten, fifteen, eighteen years old and still there is nothing finer than a blank sheet of paper, the white promise that the world can be what I make it. A magical place, an adventurous place, a possible place. Erasers take away the mistakes. Another coat of paint to cover them up. Black and red and purple and blue. Always Blue. — Stacey Jay

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next. — Adam Johnson

Women are like posters. One is stuck on top of another and covers it completely. Perhaps just for a moment, when the paste is still soft and the paper still wet and slightly transparent, you may still catch a vague impression of the splashes of color of the first, but soon there's no more trace of it. Then, when the second one is removed, both come away together, leaving your memory and your heart as blank as a wall. — Pitigrilli

Not intending to be funny: I sit at the keyboard, put my fingers on the keys and go. To me, it's the real secret of writing. Put yourself in front of the screen or the blank sheet of paper and get to work. — Robin Hobb

Staring at a blank piece of paper, I can't think of anything original. I feel utterly uninspired and unreceptive. It's the familiar malaise of 'artist's block' and in such circumstances there is only one thing to do: just start drawing.

The artist Paul Klee refers to this simple act as 'taking a line for a walk', an apt description of my own basic practice: allowing the tip of a pencil to wander through the landscape of a sketchbook, motivated by a vague impulse but hoping to find something much more interesting along the way. Strokes, hooks, squiggles and loops can resolve into hills, faces, animals, machines -even abstract feelings- the meanings of which are often secondary to the simple act of making (something young children know intuitively). Images are not preconceived and then drawn, they are conceived as they are drawn. Indeed, drawing is its own form of thinking, in the same way birdsong is 'thought about' within a bird's throat. — Shaun Tan

The boss had a long list of reasons for letting me go
most of which, I am ashamed to admit, were generously understated. It's true, for instance, that I hogged the photocopier for hours on end and snapped at whoever politely
deferentially
inquired about how much longer I would be. I was intent on achieving definitively sooty, penumbral effects to ensure that copies looked like copies, and that, of course, took time. Some days I spent entire afternoons reproducing blank sheets of paper, ream after ream, to use instead of the "FROM THE DESK OF
" notepads the boss kept ordering for each of us. — Gary Lutz

Her mind blank, she pulled a sheet of paper toward herself, then folded over a vertical strip. Sliding her nail along the edge to weaken it, she tore off a thin strip. Then another. The smooth actions helped order her thoughts. "No, it is not appropriate, but it might be all right. Why do you think you must nickname me? Is it to belittle me or to create a bond between us?" "I'm not sure which is the right answer," he replied. "To be honest, at first I expected you to be selfish and spoiled." "Such compliments will give me the vapors." Smoothing her strips of paper, she began pleating them into a little spring. If her hands trembled a little, he would not notice. — Theresa Romain

My favorite thing is to be alone in a room with a blank paper in front of me and the time to fill it. — Dirk Benedict

Every time you look at a blank piece of paper, you're doing something new. You have to step onto that blank territory and remind yourself the sky didn't fall in the last time you wrote. Writing is a question of overcoming your fears-and everybody has them. — William Zinsser

I didn't know anything about movies or movie stars or the Academy or anything. I was just a blank sheet of paper. I was totally ignorant of all that stuff. I never went to the movies, didn't know anything about the movies. — Mary Badham

Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product. — Edward Steichen

The words in his book wormed off the pages.
Everything glittered like blank paper. — Sylvia Plath

One night she had a dream where Jesus paid her a visit. In the dream, He came to her rather excitedly and handed her a piece of paper. The paper was blank except for the letterhead at the top that appeared in a beautiful pink font which read: "Super Praying Medic's Wife." After handing her the blank piece of paper, He looked excitedly into her eyes and asked, "What are you going to be?" This dream profoundly changed the way in which my wife saw her relationship with Jesus. Rather than thinking she had to somehow know — Praying Medic

It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them. — Truman Capote

We let ourselves loose on that simple blank piece of paper, and our bodies spill. The terror, the love ... embodying our stories page after page. In a sense, the pen was our tongue, it is how we delineate the world. — Coco J. Ginger

All I have to do is keep my spirit, feelings and conscience like a sheet of blank paper, and let the Spirit and power of God write upon it what He pleases. When He writes, I will read; but if I read before He writes, I am very likely to be wrong — Brigham Young

She knew she could never love any man the way she loved a blank sheet of paper that only she could fill. — Coco J. Ginger

A simple word or phrase on a blank sheet of paper gathers momentum as I wonder at what it could mean, where it could take place, why, and what if? . . . And then, I write. — Tyrean Martinson

Make mistakes. Make great mistakes , make wonderful mistakes, make glorious mistakes. Better to make a hundred mistakes than to stare at a blank piece of paper too scared to do anything wrong, too scared to do anything. — Neil Gaiman

Writing in a journal is just a stall, a waiting game, a way to tell yourself that you're working when you're not, that you're doing something of value when you're just using up paper, that you're a writer when in fact you're just going through the motions of one. Look at me! I have blank paper in front of me-and now I'm filling it, with words! — Robert Masello

Start with a blank surface. It doesn't have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember. — Stephen King

Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China's 600 million people is that they are "poor and blank". This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing. Poverty gives rise to the desire for changes the desire for action and the desire for revolution. On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written; the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted. — Mao Zedong

When some guy shows up with a shopping bag full of records and CD's and wants me to sign every one plus fifteen pieces of blank paper I wonder what the hell is he doing with all of that? — Jimmy Carl Black

My father makes to-do lists, makes plans, makes business plans. This is how he starts, always with a blank sheet of graph paper. — Charles Yu

She glanced up at him, and in that moment he pulled his wet shirt over his head. She forced her mind blank. Blank as a new sheet of paper, blank as a starless sky. He came to the fire and crouched before it. He rubbed the water from his bare arms and flicked it in the flames. She stared at the goose and sliced his drumstick carefully and thought of the blankest expression on the blankest face she could possibly imagine. It was a chilly evening; she thought about that. The goose would be delicious, they must eat as much of it as possible, they must not waste it; she thought about that. — Kristin Cashore

I'm glad to report that even now, at this late day, a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me - more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears. I can remember, really quite distinctly, looking a sheet of paper square in the eyes when I was seven or eight years old and thinking, 'This is where I belong, this is it'. — E.B. White

It's easier to revise lousy writing than to revise a blank sheet of paper. — S.A. Bodeen

And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold- but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy- and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they may, the better, keep the Niles and Amazons flowing. — Mary Oliver

There is nothing more frightening or exciting than a blank piece of paper. Frightening because you're on your own, leaving dark tracks across that snowy plain, and exciting because no one knows your destination but yourself, and even you can't say exactly where you'll end up. — Robert McCammon

Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas? — Mark Vonnegut

I believe in magic. As a writer, I create them on blank paper. — Sonnia Kemmer

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper. — Steve Martin

See this page of paper? It's blank," Scull said. "That, sir, is the most frightening battlefield in the world: the blank page. I mean to fill this paper with decent sentences, sir - this page and hundreds like it. Let me tell you, Colonel, it's harder than fighting Lee. Why, it's harder than fighting Napoleon. It requires unremitting attention, — Larry McMurtry

After tonight I will not date put pen to paper again. A blank page to me is like a drink to an alcoholic. — Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature. — Theodore Dalrymple

He often said he had to be a writer because he wasn't good at anything else. He was not good at being an employee. Back in the mid-1950's, he was employed for Sports Illustrated, briefly. He reported back to work, was asked to write a short piece on a racehorse that jumped over a fence and tried to run away. Kurt stared at the blank piece of paper all morning and then typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and walked out, self-employed again. — Mark Vonnegut

There's this phase in the middle of the process where there's still the potential that this will be great, but it's not a blank sheet of paper anymore, and that phase is always my favorite part and the part that I tend to want to stretch out and spend as much time in as possible. — Charlie Clouser

Create a guidebook of creative dreams
You can use a blank book or just blank paper clipped together. Put photographs or scraps from magazines in that represent your creative dreams. Draw, scribble, or paint in between the images. Make a list of creative dreams you've thought of or admire in others. — SARK

Salvador Dali, lying on his deathbed in a stupor, is said to have been fed thousands of sheets of blank paper to sign for fake lithographs. — Peter Landesman

And they spoke of their Antigonie, who they called Go, as if she were a friend.
Leo hadn't yet written any music, but he had made drawings on butcher paper stolen from the kitchen. They curled around his walls, intricate doodles, extensions of the boy's own lean, slight body. The shape of Leo's jaw in profile, devestating. The way he gnawed his fingernails to the crescents, the fine shining hairs down the center of his nape, the smell of him, up close, pure and clean, bleaching.
The ones made for music are the most beloved of all. Their bodies a container for the spirit within; the best of them is music, the rest only instrument of flesh and bone.
The weather conspired. Snow fell softly in the windows. It was too cold to be out for long. The world colorless, a dreamscape, a blank page, the linger of woodsmoke on the back of the tongue. — Lauren Groff

I have a huge respect for writers and realise that this is not an area that I find easy. I doubt that I would have the patience in front of a blank sheet of paper to become a writer. — Jenny Agutter

Of all false assertions that ever went into the world under the banner of a great name and the mail armor of a well-turned phrase, Locke's comparison of the mind to a blank sheet of paper appears to me among the most untrue. — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Time is a blank paper we paint with our best colors; is a gift to feel well and exercising happiness. — Markus Thayer

It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for... Flat expanses would call to me... These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor... — Rebecca Solnit

There's something magical about the experience of taking a blank sheet of paper and being able to make it take flight with just a few careful, strategic folds. The art of paper plane making has been used for generations, not just to prototype big ideas and lofty innovations - without the humble paper plane, there might have been no Wright brothers' first flight - but also to teach children about engineering, physics, possibility and small miracles. With one or two simple folds, a child learns that her actions can affect her results and that the way she builds something matters. — Bernadette Jiwa

My life was a blank paper, until you came to rhyme with words & make it a poetry book. — Akansh Malik

If you're looking at a blank piece of paper and nothing comes to you, then go do something else. Writer's block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you should feel the need to say something. — Hugh MacLeod

I was standing onstage last year, and I felt like I wanted to be somewhere else. No matter how many people were out there, it all just felt like a blank sheet of paper. — Kenny Chesney

Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas. — Henry Petroski

The future is an empty canvas or a blank sheet of paper, and if you have the courage of your own thought and your own observation you can make of it what you will — Lewis H. Lapham

Writing is very difficult. You have 120 pages of blank paper and it's like, "Go fill that up with some funny stuff," and that's challenging. — Bobby Farrelly

When ink joins with a pen, then the blank paper
can say something. Rushes and reeds must be woven
to be useful as a mat. If they weren't interlaced, the wind would blow them away. — Jalaluddin Rumi

Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper — Paul Erdos

Be proud of your mistakes. Well, proud may not be exactly the right word, but respect them, treasure them, be kind to them, learn from them. And, more than that, and more important than that, make them. Make mistakes. Make great mistakes, make wonderful mistakes, make glorious mistakes. Better to make a hundred mistakes than to stare at a blank piece of paper too scared to do anything wrong. — Neil Gaiman

And [Asimov]'ll sign anything, hardbacks, softbacks, other people's books, scraps of paper. Inevitably someone handed him a blank check on the occasion when I was there, and he signed that without as much as a waver to his smile - except that he signed: 'Harlan Ellison. — Isaac Asimov

Koschei, Koschei," she whispered. "What would I have been if I had never seen the birds? I am no one; I am nothing. I am a blank paper on which you and your magic wrote a girl. Just the kind of girl you wanted, all hungry and hurt and needing. A machine for loving you. Nothing in me was not made by you. — Catherynne M Valente

Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a l like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper. — John Fowles

Writing is about a blank piece of paper and leaving out what's not supposed to be there. — John Prine

I did actually sit down with a blank sheet of paper once. I think the phone rang and that was the end of my literary career. — Bill Nighy

Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. — Gene Fowler

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins. — Neil Gaiman

Don't take purposeless people as your leaders. Their life is like an empty book with a nice cover paper and you have attempted to buy it. Of which use will it be to you for you to read blank pages. — Israelmore Ayivor

Life before consciousness was like blank paper, so be it. — Santosh Kalwar