Empty Page Quotes

One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

Through my college years, topping that ridge had always given me a great sense of being home, but time had diminished the emotion and I had begun to suspect that home was less a place than an empty page.

Blank paper always symbolizes the anxiety of the painter.

I am obsessed by the idea of silence. I went through an entire library studying art, artists and their critics, philosophers, too, on the meaning and significance of the color white. I dreamed of white birds and white bears. I thought about the white pages of my mother's journals. I became enthralled with John Cage and his work, 4'33”, his masterpiece of ambient sound. Rauschenberg, too. And then at some point I let go. What sticks to the soul is what gets placed on the page. Maybe that's the unknown part, the mystery, the power of the empty page.

Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible.

Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

It's so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.

The good news, when you write with another, is that you never have an empty page in front of you. The bad news is... you never have an empty page in front of you.

he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular