Top 100 Austin Kleon Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Austin Kleon

#1. Copying is about reverse-engineering.

#2. If you just mimic the surface of somebody's work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more than a knockoff.

Austin Kleon

#3. This is yet another trait of amateurs - they'll use whatever tools they can get their hands on to try to get their ideas into the world.

Austin Kleon

#4. Inertia is the death of creativity

Austin Kleon

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

Austin Kleon

#6. In fact, sharing your process might actually be most valuable if the products of your work aren't easily shared,

Austin Kleon

#7. If you want people to know about what you do and the things you care about, you have to share.

Austin Kleon

#8. There is a kind of fallout that happens when you leave college. The classroom is a wonderful, if artificial, place: Your professor gets paid to pay attention to your ideas, and your classmates are paying to pay attention to your ideas. Never again in your life will you have such a captive audience.

Austin Kleon

#9. Don't try to be hip or cool. Being open and honest about what you like is the best way to connect with people who like those things, too.

Austin Kleon

#10. Find the most talented person in the room, and if it's not you, go stand next to him. Hang out with him. Try to be helpful.

Austin Kleon

#11. Ask anybody doing truly creative work, and they'll tell you the truth: They don't know where the good stuff comes from. They just show up to do their thing. Every day.

Austin Kleon

#12. Art that only comes from the head isn't any good.

Austin Kleon

#13. We were kids without fathers ... so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves. - Jay-Z

Austin Kleon

#14. It's not that people are mean or cruel, they're just busy.

Austin Kleon

#15. Surround yourself with books and objects that you love. Tape things up on the wall. Create your own world.

Austin Kleon

#16. Don't throw any of yourself away. Don't worry about a grand scheme or unified vision for your work. Don't worry about unity
what unifies your work is the fact that you made it. One day you'll look back and it will all make sense.

Austin Kleon

#17. The world is changing at such a rapid rate that it's turning us all into amateurs. Even for professionals, the best way to flourish is to retain an amateur's spirit and embrace uncertainty and the unknown.

Austin Kleon

#18. Complain about the way other people make software by making software.

Austin Kleon

#19. Read deeply. Stay open. Continue to wonder.

Austin Kleon

#20. Neil Young sang, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." I say it's better to burn slow and see your grandkids.

Austin Kleon

#21. In the digital age, don't forget to use your digits!

Austin Kleon

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

Austin Kleon

#23. Writing a page each day doesn't seem like much, but do it for 365 days and you have enough to fill a novel.

Austin Kleon

#24. If you look to artists who've managed to achieve lifelong careers, you detect the same pattern: They all have been able to persevere, regardless of success or failure.

Austin Kleon

#25. Your brain gets too comfortable in your everyday surroundings. You need to make it uncomfortable. You need to spend some time in another land, among people that do things differently than you. Travel makes the world look new, and when the world looks new, our brains work harder.

Austin Kleon

#26. The only mofos in my circle are people that I can learn from.

Austin Kleon

#27. It's one of my theories that when people give you advice, they're really just talking to themselves in the past.

Austin Kleon

#28. The writer Wilson Mizner said if you copy from one author, it's plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it's research. I

Austin Kleon

#29. The German writer Goethe said, "We are shaped and fashioned by what we love." "We

Austin Kleon

#30. It's so important to have a hobby. A hobby is something creative that's just for you. You don't try to make money or get famous off it, you just do it because it makes you happy. A hobby is something that gives you but doesn't take.

Austin Kleon

#31. Once the computer is involved, things are on an inevitable path to being finished. Whereas in my sketchbook the possibilities are endless.

Austin Kleon

#32. It's not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable.

Austin Kleon

#33. You'll never get that freedom back again once people start paying you attention, and especially not once they start paying you money.

Austin Kleon

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

Austin Kleon

#35. You're never "keeping it real" with your lack of punctuation and proofreading, you're keeping it unintelligible.

Austin Kleon

#36. When I get busy, I get stupid.

Austin Kleon

#37. I had a professor in college who returned our graded essays, walked up to the chalkboard, and wrote in huge letters: "SO WHAT?" She threw the piece of chalk down and said, "Ask yourself that every time you turn in a piece of writing." It's a lesson I never forgot.

Austin Kleon

#38. Once a day, after you've done your day's work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share.

Austin Kleon

#39. Write the kind of story you like best - write the story you want to read.

Austin Kleon

#40. If you have two or three real passions, don't feel like you have to pick and choose between them. Don't discard. Keep all your passions in your life. This is something I learned from the playwright Steven Tomlinson.

Austin Kleon

#41. 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.

Austin Kleon

#42. You don't have to live anywhere other than the place you are to start connecting with the world you want to be in.

Austin Kleon

#43. So go on, get angry. But keep your mouth shut and go do your work.

Austin Kleon

#44. Become a documentarian of what you do.

Austin Kleon

#45. Don't show your lunch or your latte; show your work.

Austin Kleon

#46. The art of holding on to money is all about saying no to consumer culture. Saying no to takeout, $4 lattes, and that shiny new computer when the old one still works fine.

Austin Kleon

#47. Not everybody will get it. People will misinterpret you and what you do. They might even call you names. So get comfortable with being misunderstood, disparaged, or ignored
the trick is to be too busy doing your work to care.

Austin Kleon

#48. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work effects how they value it.

Austin Kleon

#49. You can turn your flow into stock.

Austin Kleon

#50. 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.

Austin Kleon

#51. Find a scenius, pay attention to what others are sharing, and then start taking note of what they're not sharing.

Austin Kleon

#52. You can't count on success; you can only leave open the possibility for it, and be ready to jump on and take the ride when it comes for you.

Austin Kleon

#53. If you feel like you have two or three real passions, don't pick and choose between them. Don't discard. Keep all your passions in your life.

Austin Kleon

#54. Show just a little bit of what you're working on.

Austin Kleon

#55. Keep all your passions in your life.

Austin Kleon

#56. Forget about being an expert or a professional, and wear your amateurism (your heart, your love) on your sleeve. Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.

Austin Kleon

#57. To be "interest-ing" is to be curious and attentive, and to practice "the continual projection of interest." To put it more simply: If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested.

Austin Kleon

#58. Try it: Instead of keeping a rejection file, keep a praise file. Use it sparingly - don't get lost in past glory - but keep it around for when you need the lift.

Austin Kleon

#59. If you want to be more effective when sharing yourself and your work, you need to become a better storyteller.

Austin Kleon

#60. If we're free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running from it,

Austin Kleon

#61. Whenever you're at a loss for what move to make next, just ask yourself, What would make a betterstory?

Austin Kleon

#62. If you're worried about giving your secrets away, you can share your dots without connecting them.

Austin Kleon

#63. There is no misery in art. All art is about saying yes, and all art is about its own making. - John Currin

Austin Kleon

#64. 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.

Austin Kleon

#65. Don't talk to people you don't want to talk to, and don't talk about stuff you don't want to talk about.

Austin Kleon

#66. Ironically, really good work often appears to be effortless. People will say, "Why didn't I think of that?" They won't see the years of toil and sweat that went into it.

Austin Kleon

#67. Whenever Picasso learned how to do something, he abandoned it.

Austin Kleon

#68. The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning in front of others.

Austin Kleon

#69. Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public. They're in love, so they don't hesitate to do work that others think of as silly or just plain stupid.

Austin Kleon

#70. Everybody loves a good story, but good storytelling doesn't come easy to everybody. It's a skill that takes a lifetime to master. So study the great stories and then go find some of your own. Your stories will get better the more you tell them.

Austin Kleon

#71. The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes. - Annie Dillard

Austin Kleon

#72. Don't feel guilty about the pleasures you take in the things you enjoy.

Austin Kleon

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

Austin Kleon

#74. You can't find your voice if you don't use it.

Austin Kleon

#75. Maira Kalman says, Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.

Austin Kleon

#76. There's an intuition learned through our work. Teaching others doesn't mean they can just go out and replicate it.

Austin Kleon

#77. You and I will be around a lot longer than Twitter, and nothing substitutes face to face. - Rob Delaney It

Austin Kleon

#78. If you have one person you're influenced by, everyone will say you're the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you're so original.

Austin Kleon

#79. The number one rule of the Internet: People are lazy. If you don't include a link, no one can click it. Attribution without a link online borders on useless: 99.9 percent of people are not going to bother Googling someone's name.

Austin Kleon

#80. It takes a lot of energy to be creative. You don't have that energy if you waste it on other stuff.

Austin Kleon

#81. What to copy is a little bit trickier. Don't just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style.

Austin Kleon

#82. Imitation is about copying. Emulation is when imitation goes one step further, breaking through into your own thing.

Austin Kleon

#83. Dress for the job you want, not the job you have, and you have to start doing the work you want to be doing.

Austin Kleon

#84. Life is a lonely business

Austin Kleon

#85. Today isn't just another day. Today I'll create something beautiful.

Austin Kleon

#86. A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we're incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve.

Austin Kleon

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

Austin Kleon

#88. 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.

Austin Kleon

#89. First, you have to figure out who to copy. Second, you have to figure out what to copy.

Austin Kleon

#90. The computer is really good for editing your ideas, and it's really good for getting your ideas ready for publishing out into the world, but it's not really good for generating ideas.

Austin Kleon

#91. The way to get over creative block is to simply place some constraints on yourself. It seems contradictory, but when it comes to creative work, limitations mean freedom.

Austin Kleon