Quotes & Sayings About The Blank Page

Nobody's mind ever remains a blank page, however carefully they are locked away from the world. — Frances Hardinge

I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence. — Charles Krauthammer

The page is long, blank, and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words. — Jack Kerouac

When I was a boy, my mother would tell me that one of the best things in life is the knowledge that our story isn't over yet. Our story may have come to a close, but your story is still yet to be told.
Make it a story worthy of you — Renee Ahdieh

As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it, no painter ever stands before a completely blank canvas, no author ever sits before a blank page. In fact, the surface confronting the modern artist is full of inherited images that must first be cleared from the imagination before one can begin to create one's own. — Marie Luise Knott

The key role of entrepreneurs, like the most crucial role of scientists, is not to fill in the gaps in an existing market or theory, but to generate entirely new markets or theories ... They stand before a canvas as empty as any painter's; a page as blank as any poet's. — George Gilder

The best tip for writing is just to write; to sit down and write, to begin doing it and not to be scared by the blank page. — David Almond

Don't think too much. There'll be time to think later. Analysis won't help. You're chiseling now. You're passing your hands over the wood. Now the page is no longer blank. There's something there. It isn't your business yet to know whether it's going to be prize-worthy someday, or whether it will gather dust in a drawer. Now you've carved the tree. You've chiseled the marbled. You've begun. — Dani Shapiro

The blank page is the canvas on which a writer paints a story. — Stephanie Ayers

Never sit staring at a blank page or screen. If you find yourself stuck, write. Write about the scene you're trying to write. Writing about is easier than writing, and chances are, it will give you your way in. — Laini Taylor

The essential thing was to plot my next move. But that was precisely what gave me the most trouble, the thing I could no longer do. I had lost the ability to think ahead, and no matter how hard I tried to imagine the future, I could not see it, I could not see anything at all. The only future that had ever belonged to me was the present I was living in now, and the struggle to remain in that present had gradually overwhelmed the rest. I had no ideas anymore. The moments unfurled one after the other, and at each moment the future stood before me as a blank, a white page of uncertainty. — Paul Auster

The story of who you are, were, will be: you don't have to accept any of this. If you want, bypass selective editing and let the whole thing go. All of it. Stay on the blank page as long as you want; then write a new story if you like. Just remember that you'll have to write in roles for other people that they like if you want others to play along. — Jason Louv

It is so painful for a historian to begin his tale convinced no one will believe him, that if I thought belief had quite vanished from the face of this earth, I would leave this page blank. — Anne Gedeon LaFitte

The future is a blank page, but not a mystery. — Lisa Wingate

There was something wonderful about a blank sheet of notepaper. The lines were there, just waiting to be filled, and the page could turn into anything from a grocery list to the opening of The Great American Novel. The possibilities were endless. — Joanne Fluke

I sat down, turning the pages of my notebook in search of a blank page, in the dim light of my room. The arrival of nightfall had invited leafy shadows to play hide and seek in the glass reflection of the window. I smiled as one of these mischievous shadows crept across the page in a midnight dance. — Gina Marinello-Sweeney

The hours spent forming a written work can make one obsessive, distracted, compulsive, and neurotic even, especially when it comes to those rare, precious occasions of streaming pure inspiration. To have a muse moment interrupted - to watch her scuttle back into hiding with unshared insight remaining on the tip of her tongue - is a wicked irritation. When a writer's eyes glaze over, when she stares off at nothing or appears to be memorizing the lines on a blank page, when she falls asleep at the desk ... tiptoe softly. For a writer's greatest desire is to receive inspiration; her greatest nightmare, to have tossed to the wind what could've been captured in words. — Richelle E. Goodrich

The writer presents himself to the blank page not with an open passport but an open heart. — Taiye Selasi

If you look closely, there is no book more visual than Three Trapped Tigers, in that it is filled with blank pages, dark pages, it has stars made of words, the famous magical cube made of numbers, and there is even a page which is a mirror. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

A certain bygone philosophy-which certainly must have quite forgotten all about the real child-used to speak of the child's nature as a tabula rasa, or 'blank page,' upon which experience and training might write what they pleased. As a matter of fact, the child's nature at birth, like that of a calf or a chick, is pretty well scribbled over by the experience of its ancestors. It is far from being blank, for as soon as the little organism comes into the world, it begins to do certain things and do them with much zeal and determination, as every one knows who knows real children. — Edward O. Sisson

Writing poetry is like an opiate. When you get hooked on a blank page in the notebook, that attracts you like fireflies in the night, and you just have to translate your thoughts into words.
I'm addicted to words. — Stjepan Varesevac Cobets

I live for the blank page. — Lisa Unger

Writers are alphabet artists. The blank page becomes their canvas as they paint pictures with words. — Barbara Case Speers

Writer's block.. when one curses the blinking cursor on the blank page. — Regina Brett

One thing I knew about the novelist's task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death. — Philip Sington

The acting background helped a lot when I started writing. I was training for it. In acting class they teach you about the stakes in a scene (and) what motivates characters. When you bring a scene to class - as an actor with your scene partner - you have to do everything. There's no producer, set decorator or anything like that. You and you partner have to do everything and that's kind of like facing the blank page as a writer. — Carol Higgins Clark

It's the silence that scares me. It's the blank page on which I can write my own fears. — Mark Lawrence

But to me, the most important page in my daughter's book is the last one - because it's blank. It says 'Your Hero's Photo Here,' and 'Your Hero's Story Here.' — Brad Meltzer

The answer scrawled on a blank page in a daily newspaper, was conceived whilst aboard a ferry. — Harold Stephen Black

To live a good life: We have the potential for it. If we can learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference. This is how we learn: by looking at each thing, both the parts and the whole. Keeping in mind that none of them can dictate how we perceive it. They don't impose themselves on us. They hover before us, unmoving. It is we who generate the judgments - inscribing them on ourselves. And we don't have to. We could leave the page blank - and if a mark slips through, erase it instantly. Remember how brief is the attentiveness required. And then our lives will end. And why is it so hard when things go against you? If it's imposed by nature, accept it gladly and stop fighting it. And if not, work out what your own nature requires, and aim at that, even if it brings you no glory. None of us is forbidden to pursue our own good. — Marcus Aurelius

I am the blank page between the Old and the New Testament. — Benjamin Disraeli

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.
From, The Joy of Writing, Wislawa Szymborska — Wislawa Szymborska

In the end, I am quite normal. I don't have odd habits. I don't dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don't talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer's block, all those things that we hear about writers. — Jose Saramago

Staring at the blank page before you, Open up the dirty window, Let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find. — Natasha Bedingfield

As a writer, I can think of no greater terror than confronting a blank page, except perhaps the terror of being shot at. — Richard Castle

On the blank page all things are possible. — Marty Rubin

They say that writers face the blank page. That's not true. It's more like 200 hundred blank pages! — R.S. Mellette

To remind us that our lives are made up of blank sheets waiting to be filled," Lillith replied. "The book of life is open when we are born, and it closes with our death. We write in it continually, but no matter how much we write, what joy or sorrow we experience or what mistakes we have made, we will always turn the page, and tomorrow's page is always blank. — Margaret Weis

White. A blank page or canvas. The challenge. Bring order to the whole Through design, composition, tension, balance, light, and harmony. — Stephen Sondheim

Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into the language. And the particular magic of homeland, its particular spell over irie, was that it sounded like a beginning. The beginningest of beginnings. Like the first morning of Eden and the day after apocalypse. A blank page. (p.332) — Zadie Smith

I am the poet, you are the poem; I hold the pen, you are the words, love is the ink, silence is the blank page. — Jenim Dibie

To merely blank the page and assume that 'religion' is the cause of all the world's problems is, on the contrary, an allegation brought about by nothing more than cognitive lethargy; it is when unburied and exposed but a stale conclusion and a misdirection of the one overwhelmed by centuries of sound theology, scholarly thought, and spiritual development. — Criss Jami

Director and producers have to take all the risks they can. We developed this film with the possibility to create departing from a blank page and to discover things as the process went along and as we understood the things that at first we couldn't understand in words. — Alex Abreu

Good can be a stifling word, a word that makes you hesitate and stare at a blank page and second-guess yourself and throw stuff in the trash. What's important is to get your hands moving and let the images come. Whether it's good or bad is beside the point. Make art. — Austin Kleon

Having the great opportunity on a daily basis to sit in front of a blank page is terrifying, and at the same time really exciting. I can't actually get better at my job, because every time you finish something you start with a blank page, with nothing. — Hans Zimmer

By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I'm talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren. — Michael Morpurgo

I try not to make plans. God always laughs at your plans. I'm going to keep the door open, and keep the page blank, and see what gets painted upon it. — Tom Hiddleston

When you can no longer differentiate between the insanity spewed onto the blank page, and the madness evident in the all-but shattered mirror ... that's when you know you're doing it right. — Dave Matthes

There are some who believe that the mind is a blank tablet, on which experience is writ until the page be full, and the cryptic world is known; but I see rather that my own life hath been one long forgetting, the erasure of what was drawn, a terrible redaction; til all that remains is blank white and comfortless.
I know not what we have been; I know not what we are; but I know what we might be.
And so I light out for the unknown regions. — M T Anderson

I like writing a lot more than I used to. I used to find it scary but now I've got used to it once it gets going. I used to find it hard to start. Fear of the blank page. The first thing you write down won't bear any relation to what's in your head and that's always disappointing. — Victoria Wood

It came to me, as I walked, how bitter the irony of the Book had been which had said: Herein the Truth. For it had a truth of its own in its bleached barrenness. What was truth except something which faded, lost its shape, grew unreadable and indistinguishable, at last a blank page for men to write on what they wished. — Tanith Lee

A writer is very much like the captain on a star ship facing the unknown. When you face the blank page and you have no idea where you're going. It can be terrifying, but it can also be the adventure of a lifetime. — Michael Piller

Plagiarism is the fear of a blank page. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet? — Georges Perec

Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations. — Francine Prose

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Besides the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

- The Thought Fox — Ted Hughes

The experience of returning to the blank page and having nothing in the drawer was intensely painful. I just thought, I never want that to happen again. — Edgar Wright

I am a college-educated American. In all my years of formal schooling, I never read Plato or Aristotle, Homer or Virgil. I knew nothing of Greek and Roman history and barely grasped the meaning of the Middle Ages. Dante was a stranger to me, and so was Shakespeare. The fifteen hundred years of Christianity from the end of the New Testament to the Reformation were a blank page, and I knew only the barest facts about Luther's revolution. I was ignorant of Descartes and Newton. My understanding of Western history began with the Enlightenment. Everything that came before it was lost behind a misty curtain of forgetting. Nobody did this on purpose. Nobody tried to deprive me of my civilizational patrimony. But nobody felt any obligation to present it to me and my generation in an orderly, coherent fashion. Ideas have consequences - and so does their lack. — Rod Dreher

I hate when a director says to me 'Here's how I envision this scene' ... excuse me? It's right here in the script - I 'envisioned' it FOR you. Do what I wrote. If you want to 'envision', you should become a writer. Where the fuck were you when the page was blank? — Harlan Ellison

She looked at the empty page, which remained blank, apart from the small wet dots from her tears, for hours. Her mind was a turmoil of sadness, rage, fear and all those emotions that gave her inspiration. However her heart lacked the will as the empty words enclosed her soul pulling it down towards the frenzied ravenous imps that stalked hells pantry.... — Virginia Alison

Tomorrow, is the first blank page of a 365 page book. Write a good one. — Brad Paisley

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once. — John Updike

One of the strangest things is the act of creation.
You are faced with a blank slate - a page, a canvas, a block of stone or wood, a silent musical instrument.
You then look inside yourself. You pull and tug and squeeze and fish around for slippery raw shapeless things that swim like fish made of cloud vapor and fill you with living clamor. You latch onto something. And you bring it forth out of your head like Zeus giving birth to Athena.
And as it comes out, it takes shape and tangible form.
It drips on the canvas, and slides through your pen, it springs forth and resonates into the musical strings, and slips along the edge of the sculptor's tool onto the surface of the wood or marble.
You have given it cohesion. You have brought forth something ordered and beautiful out of nothing.
You have glimpsed the divine. — Vera Nazarian

The truth is, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist is the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two have in common is the blank page. The jobs entail different talents and different desires. — Lynsey Addario

The video maker doesn't easily face a blank page. Because the videomaker can run it either any way, this way or the other way and erase it if they don't like it and so on. — Stan Brakhage

A theatre is not a blank page for editorial, it is not a soapbox or a Tannoy system: it is a conscience that wakes with what is happening in the space, and wakes further still in response to what people are making of it. — Andrew O'Hagan

Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet - so deadly sad - that to read one line of it would dissolve any courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank: something like the world when the deluge was gone by. — Charlotte Bronte

Each new day is a blank page in the diary of your life. The secret of success is in turning that diary into the best story you possibly can. — Douglas Pagels

The truth was, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist was the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two had in common was the blank page. — Lynsey Addario

Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas's house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless
as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life. The house also stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing. Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own overfilled mind. The problem is to clear out most of what is in it ... The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee, as I wanted to flee from Thomas's house. — Janet Malcolm

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

The act of creation fascinates me. You can only sit with blank page and wait. You cannot press a button, cannot program it. — Joan Rivers

I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness of it all - what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewriters? Or those who talk about having to stare at a blank page - do they want someone to write on it? — Wilfrid

Everyday we just copy&paste ourselves from the previous day instead of creating a new blank page and be something different and original. — Marcelo Goianira

The blank page is the great equalizer and grand opportunity for continued learning and growth. — K.J. Kilton

A life hidden behind the veil of excuses leaves behind a blank page, but a life with the brilliant light of purpose shone upon it fills every page with wisdom. — Farshad Asl

A lot of people don't like to spend money on a journal because they're afraid to wreck it, which is understandable. I buy beautifully made leather-bound journals because I have lost my fear of the blank page. — Keri Smith

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

The roughest part for me when I'm writing a song is staring at a blank page. Where am I going from here? If you're a songwriter, you have to do that every time you start a song. — Bob Weir

But when I accept the call of creative passion, I am a bold stroke of vermilion, a renegade hyperbole, or the wild fury of jazz violin. The world is a canvas to explore, a blank page to fill, and an arpeggio of waiting experiences. This moving masterpiece called "life" becomes intoxicating when it's lived as if it were art. — Jill Badonsky

- I been here before, haven't I?
He just sat there staring out at the plain.
Son of a bitch, I thought. He's ignoring me.
- Hey, I said, I'm not the dead, not a shade in passing. I'm flesh and blood here.
He pulled a notebook out of his pocket and started writing.
- You got to at least look at me, I said. After all, it is my dream.
I drew closer. Close enough to see what he was writing. He had his notebook open to a blank page and three words suddenly materialized.
Nope, it's mine.
- Well, I'll be damned, I murmured. I shaded my eyes and stood there looking out toward what he was seeing - dust clouds flatbed tumbleweed white sky - a whole lot of nothing.
- The writer is a conductor, he drawled. — Patti Smith

I like to watch his hands as he works, making a blank page bloom with strokes of ink, adding touches of color to our previously black and yellowish book. His face takes on a special look when he concentrates. His usual easy expression is replaced by something more intense and removed that suggests an entire world locked away inside him. I've seen flashes of this before: in the arena, or when he speaks to a crowd, or that time he shoved the Peacekeepers' guns away from me in District 11. I don't know quite what to make of it. I also become a little fixated on his eyelashes, which ordinarily you don't notice much because they're so blond. But up close, in the sunlight slanting in from the window, they're a light golden color and so long I don't see how they keep from getting all tangled up when he blinks. — Suzanne Collins

Thomas More's birth was noted by his father upon a blank page at the back of a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'Historia Regum Britanniae'; for a lawyer John More was remarkably inexact in his references to that natal year, and the date has been moved from 1477 to 1478 and back again. — Peter Ackroyd

Constant rejection. No security. Career paths being dictated by freelance reviewers. And of course, the terror of the writing desk, of the blank page. Why is it so hard for our non-writer friends to understand this - that it's a job? — Darin Strauss

The answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ... — John Geddes

It all adds up; never discount your efforts, because small efforts build big things. One word doesn't make a novel, but one word does begin a novel, and from that small beginning everything else follows. Even if it's just 'The', write something on that blank page. — Laurell K. Hamilton

If I had to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: I recognize only one duty, and that is to love. — Albert Camus

The question about the page is: what is beneath it? It seems to have only two dimensions, you can pick it up and turn it over and the back is the same as the front. Nothing, you say, disappointed.
But you were looking in the wrong place, you were looking on the back instead of beneath. Beneath the page is another story. Beneath the page is a story. Beneath the page is everything that has ever happened, most of which you would rather not hear about.
The page is not a pool but a skin, a skin is there to hold in and it can feel you touching it. Did you really think it would just lie there and do nothing?
Touch the page at your peril: it is you who are blank and innocent, not the page. Nevertheless you want to know, nothing will stop you. You touch the page, it's as if you've drawn a knife across it, the page has been hurt now, a sinuous wound opens, a thin incision. Darkness wells through. — Margaret Atwood

I'll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It's the silence that scares me. It's the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment. — Mark Lawrence

The blank page, otherwise known as the vast playground of the writer's imagination. — J.L. Bond

I don't even subscribe to writer's block being a truthful thing. I've had writer's laziness quite often. But I think it's all about sitting down and facing down the blank page and doing it, and I've always been ok at that. — Martin McDonagh

If tragedy does not ensnare a man, if affliction does not agitate him, if love does not lay him down in the cradle of dreams, then his life is like a blank, white page in the book of existence. In that year I saw the — Kahlil Gibran

No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet, so deadly sad, that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank, something like then world when the deluge was gone by. — Charlotte Bronte

As I stare at the blank page, I am at once awash inwords but unable to find the ones I want to use. — Carrie Ryan

Dear Diary,
All that she left inside the box was a blank book and a name. You are the book, and I am the name...An-Ya. As you know, my name is printed on your first page. Did She write it? What did She look like as She stood over you with Her pen? Were there tears in Her eyes? Why were you left empty inside? — Diane Rene Christian

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream. — Gaston Bachelard

The problem with a plan is that you fill up the blank page of a new day with a 'to-do' list before you get there. And if you're not careful there's no room for anything else.
A plan, especially a very focused one, narrows down the possibilies of the future to just a couple of things: that things either go to plan, or they don't. — John C. Parkin

When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script. — Edward Norton

It would absolutely suck if you paid a few bucks for a book only to find that on the first page it said, 'Once upon a time they all lived happily ever after' and the rest of the book was blank. — Simon Travaglia

The Garden Under Snow
Now the garden is under snow
a blank page our footprints write on
clare who was never mine
but always belonged to herself
Sleeping Beauty
a crystalline blanket
this is her spring
this is her sleeping/awakening
she is waiting
everything is waiting
the improbable shapes of roots
my baby
her face
a garden, waiting. — Audrey Niffenegger