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.

Edgar Wright

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

Space Science Age

It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words.

Anthony Doerr

Work Age Yin

One must go for a film with an open mind; a film best impacts you when your mind is a blank page to the film.

Anurag Kashyap

Age Your You

Night-time is when I brainstorm; last thing, when the family's asleep and I'm alone, I think about the next day's writing and plan a strategy for my assault on the blank page.

Athol Fugard

Time Family Alone

As a writer, a blank page will humble the hell out of you. It always does, and it always will.

Barry Jenkins

Age You Writer

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

Art Age Write

There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Poetry Life Age

I still get up every morning at 4 A.M. I write seven days a week, including Christmas. And I still face a blank page every morning, and my characters don't really care how many books I've sold.

Dan Brown

Morning Christmas Car

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

Car Age Writing

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.

Edgar Wright

Experience Age Wrote

For me, the blank page to draw on is a window to adventure.

Eduardo Risso

Age Window Wind

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

Age Writes Write

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

Famous Age You

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Age You Writer

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.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Age Write Words

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

Harold Stephen Black

Age T Raw

I enjoy the freedom of the blank page.

Irvine Welsh

Freedom Age T

The stressful time is the blank page at the beginning. When you're starting to see things being made flesh, and you're able to respond to that flesh, that's really exciting.

Jack Thorne

Time Art Age

The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean teamwork. One is always alone on the set as before the blank page. And to be alone... means to ask questions. And to make films means to answer them.

Jean-Luc Godard

Work Art Alone

What is it about the blank page that makes me want to hurl myself into a game of solitaire? I ask myself these kinds of questions while I'm playing solitaire.

Jennifer Gilmore

Age Yin While

You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

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

I can't imagine writing a novel without some sound. When you're facing a few hundred blank pages, silence can be cold.

Josh Malerman

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

Julia Cameron

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

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

Leigh Whannell

For years, when I was popular, I would face the blank page to write, and I couldn't think of anything that I thought was good enough.

Leon Russell

When I was 13, I went on 'Britain's Got Talent.' I auditioned. I sang a cover of a song called 'White Blank Page' by Mumford & Sons.

Lewis Capaldi

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.

Lincoln Child

I live for the blank page.

Lisa Unger

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 key thing is that you start every film from sort of a blank page, almost like you discover it like a child discovers a new world.

Marc Forster

Writing the first draft of a new story is incredibly difficult for me. I will happily do revisions, because once I can see the words on the page, I can go about ripping them up and moving scenes around. A blank page, though? Terrifying. I'm always angsty when I'm working my way through a first draft.

Marie Lu

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

Being an actor all of my life is kind of a collaborative, social form of interpretive art. Sitting down with a blank page every day by yourself is a different feeling.

Michael Beck

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

The hardest thing about writing, for me, is facing the blank page.

Octavia Spencer

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

There are a lot of people, who want to be writers, who stumble at a blank page. You could imagine an algorithm that could give writers a first draft or a starter kit, so it could enable people to be more prolific in their writing.

Philip M. Parker

If you are stuck on a problem, go for a walk and think about something else for a little bit. Going for a walk is very helpful for a writer because if you are staring at a blank page of a computer screen there is all this pressure.

Raphael Bob-Waksberg

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

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

Taiye Selasi

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

So at 19, I faced my first blank page as a professional writer.

Zoya Akhtar