Austin Kleon Quotes - Page 2

If I'd waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started "being creative," well, I'd still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it's in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.

If you ever find you're the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.

The thing is: It takes a lot of energy to be creative. You don't have that energy if you waste it on other stuff.

That’s the thing you have to understand about the whole process of art (or the work that we do) – you’re only half of the equation. It’s an interaction between you and the person who’s going to experience the work. The person who’s going to experience the work is bringing just as much to it and is just as important as you are.

You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, "We are shaped and fashioned by what we love."

There's a balance between what you want to give the world and what it needs. If you're lucky, your work is in the middle.

We're always being told 'find your voice.' When I was younger, I never really knew what this meant. I used to worry a lot about voice, wondering if I had my own. But now I realize that the only way to find your voice is to use it. It's hardwired, built into you. Talk about the things you love. Your voice will follow.

Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing.

The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there's a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.

Inertia is the death of creativity

The computer brings out the uptight perfectionist in us - we start editing ideas before we have them.

Genealogy of ideas. You don’t get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see.

When people give advice, they're really just talking to themselves in the past.

Google everything. I mean everything. Google your dreams, Google your problems. Don’t ask a question before you Google it. You’ll either find the answer or you’ll come up with a better question.

There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income. I think the same thing is true of idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.

You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life.

Dig into almost every overnight success story and you’ll find about a decade’s worth of hard work and perseverance.

Keep all your passions in your life.

Do good work and share it with people.

Be nice. (The world is a small town.)

Establishing and keeping a routine can be even more important than having a lot of time.

Art is theft”) and Igor Stravinsky (“Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal”), I’ve always stolen from the people I admire – not plagiarized, mind you, but stolen bits of ideas and stylistic influences. If you steal widely enough, after all, your models are inevitably changed and the result is in the end completely yours. Kleon cites André Gide to this point, in a quotation I love: “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

The biggest task in the morning is to try to keep my headspace from being invaded by the outside world.

Don't think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine.

The people who get what they’re after are very often the ones who just stick around long enough.