Top 899 Blank Slates Quotes & Sayings

You look at any war zone and you talk to any soldiers and they have to blank out - in order for that to work for them, in order for them to survive they have to blank out something in themselves in order to do it.

Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don't know anything.

As a composer, every project begins with either a blank sequence or a blank manuscript and for the first couple of days you cover and experience every emotion under the sun. Fear being the main one.

I love the big fresh starts, the clean slates like birthdays and new years, but I also really like the idea that we can get up every morning and start over.

As a writer, if you have something on a page, you can start moving it around and get something you like. But if you have a blank page, it's just gonna be a blank page.

I have two kids and they were by no means blank slates. One is exactly like me, one is exactly like my wife.

One of the fascinating things about early writing on slates, on papyrus, even on early handwritten books, is for instance, there were no space between the words. People just wrote in continuous script.

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.

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.

Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house-the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house.

I found, after the experience of making 'Shaun Of The Dead' and then returning to the blank page - because 'Shaun Of The Dead' was the first screenplay I ever wrote properly - the experience of returning to the blank page and having nothing in the drawer was intensely painful.

The writing process is the time where nothing's been set in stone. It's a blank slate, or a blank page.

Yes, the fear of its blankness. At the same time, I kind of loved it. Mallarmé was trying to make the page a blank page. But if you're going to make the page a blank page, it's not just the absence of something, it has to become something else. It has to be material, it has to be this thing. I wanted to turn a page into a thing.

"Judge not, that ye be not judge"... is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself. There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accesory to the torture and murder of his victims. The moral principle to adopt... is: "Judge, and be prepared to be judged."

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

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.

I use a computer, but before I begin each new book I keep a notebook. I write down everything that comes to mind during that period before I actually begin. It might take months or weeks. That notebook is my security blanket so that I never have to face a blank screen (or blank page). But I print out often and my best ideas usually come with a pencil in my hand.

It’s unfortunate that we live in such a panicked, dysmorphic society where women don’t even give themselves a chance to see what they’ll look like as older persons. I want to have some idea of what I’ll look like before I start cleaning the slates.

There is no beginning that is a blank page.

Blank House was exactly a nice empty sheet where nothing was accountable because you were so naughty that you were in Blank House.

What’s broken is broken—and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I live…I’m too old to believe in such sentimentalities as clean slates and starting all over.

Sometimes I have signed blank contracts.

Creativity is always a leap of faith. You're faced with a blank page, blank easel, or an empty stage.

Inside each of us is a unique person resulting from millennia of environment and heredity combined in a way that could never happen again and could never have happened before. We aren't blank slates, but we are also communal creatures who are born before our brains are fully developed, so we're very sensitive to our environment. The question is: How to find the support and the circumstances that allow you to express what's inside you?

Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don't know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, ‘You can't do a thing’. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerizes some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of `you can't' once and for all.

We are here to inscribe ourselves on the universe, and it is not inappropriate to remind ourselves of this when blank slates are given us.

For me, writing never gets easier. It's always hard work. It doesn't matter how many words you wrote the day before, or how many novels you've completed in the last decade: every day you start fresh again with that same blank page, or that same blank screen.

The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.

My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.

You can't revise a blank page.

When I write, the first blank page, or any blank page, means nothing to me. What means something is a page that has been filled with words.

Sometimes it can be really exciting, but I avoid the blank page now. What I do is hand write everything. When you're hand writing, there's never a blank page, really. There's so much you can do with that.

For any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers; besides, even the productions that are only addressed to the imagination, raise the reader a little above the gross gratification of appetites, to which the mind has not given a shade of delicacy.

Finding the discipline, the motivation, the focus, the passion to sit down in front of a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen every day and then to make it come alive with characters and with plot is incredibly exciting and at the same time terrifying and frustrating, and sometimes it comes easy and sometimes it comes really hard.

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.

Pain has an element of blank

The worst thing is the blank page at the start. Then the horrible things written on the blank page. Then deciding whether or not to throw out those horrible things: lame scenes, lame characters, bad ideas.

"Write that down," the King said to the jury, and the jury eagerly wrote down all three dates on their slates, and then added them up, and reduced the answer to shillings and pence.

Let us think of Nature as a builder, making all that we see out of atoms of a limited number of kinds, just as the builder of a house constructs it out of so many different kinds of things: bricks, slates, planks, panes of glass, and so on.

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.

You can't edit a blank page

I enjoy the freedom of the blank page.

I live for the blank page.

The most important thing to realize is we're not blank slates at birth. We don't start off with nothing in our heads, and then get imprinted entirely by our environment. There's something in our heads on the day we're born, and then we grow up and make choices.

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.

I no longer believe the conservative message that children are naturally selfish and destructive creatures who need civilizing by hierarchies or painful controls. On the contrary, I believe that hierarchy and painful controls create destructive people. And I no longer believe the liberal message that children are blank slates on which society can write anything. On the contrary, I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.

I got to college and saw all of my friends going to these other schools and thought, 'You know, college is just a blank slate.' And I had an opportunity to go to different schools, but I chose Brown because it was unique and allowed you to be yourself as an individual and like I said, it's a blank slate.

It's unfortunate that we live in such a panicked, dysmorphic society where women don't even give themselves a chance to see what they'll look like as older persons. I want to have some idea of what I'll look like before I start cleaning the slates.

I was born in the Golden West, reared in the arms of the Church, deluged with saints to draw from, and suckled on Italian art: my slates were covered from end to end with portraits of Savonarola, Fra Angelico, and Wild Bill and Sitting Bull; I knew all equally well and admired them about alike.

Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.

I went to school at this log school house. A white woman was my teacher, I do not remember her name. My father had to pay her one dollar a month for me. Us kids that went to school did not have desks, we used slates and set on the hued down logs for seats.

I was blown away when I figured out that none of the great integrative moves that I studied came as a result of starting with a blank sheet of paper - as many innovation coaches suggest. Integrative solutions came directly from mining the existing models for the best of their nuggets. So I never start with a blank sheet of paper anymore.

Actually, who hasn't been through the ghastly experience of sitting in front of a blank page, with its toothless mouth grinning at you: Go ahead, let's see you lay a finger on me? A blank page is actually a whitewashed wall with no door and no window. Beginning to tell a story is like making a pass at a total stranger in a restaurant.

I am a buyer of blank books. Kids find it interesting that I would buy a blank book. They say, Twenty-Six dollars for a blank book! Why would you pay that? The reason I pay twenty-six dollars is to challenge myself to find something worth twenty-six dollars to put in there. All my journals are private, but if you ever got hold of one of them, you wouldn't have to look very far to discover it is worth more than twenty-six dollars

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.

We're not blank slates. What we've done, what we've survived all go into us.

Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares-and who has once broken the spell of 'you can't.'

The state of mind of the photographer creating is a blank. I might add that this condition exists only at special times, namely when looking for pictures. -Something keeps him from falling off curbs, down open manholes, into bumpers of skidding trucks while in this condition but goes off duty at other times. . . . This is a very special kind of blank. A very active state of mind really, it is a very receptive state. . .

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.

Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily.