Kleon Quotes & Sayings

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

The great thing about remote or dead masters is that they can't refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work. — Austin Kleon

Pablo Picasso was notorious for sucking the energy out of the people he met. His granddaughter Marina claimed that he squeezed people like one of his tubes of oil paints. You's have a great time hanging out all day with Picasso, and then you's go home nervous and exhausted, and Picasso would go back to his studio and paint all night, using the energy he'd sucked out of you. — Austin Kleon

Conan O'Brien has talked about how comedians try to emulate their heroes, fall short, and end up doing their own thing. Johnny Carson tried to be Jack Benny but ended up Johnny Carson. David Letterman tried to copy Johnny Carson but ended up David Letterman. And Conan O'Brien tried to be David Letterman but ended up Conan O'Brien. In O'Brien's words, "It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique." Thank goodness. — Austin Kleon

We found the future, like birds fly into windows. — Austin Kleon

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

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

The minute you learn something, turn around and teach it to others. — Austin Kleon

Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. — Austin Kleon

Scenius." Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals - artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers - who make up an "ecology of talent. — Austin Kleon

Keep all your passions in your life. — Austin Kleon

Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you'll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It's that simple. — Austin Kleon

Become a documentarian of what you do. — Austin Kleon

You're only going to be as good as the people you surround yourself with. — Austin Kleon

When you open up your process and invite people in, you learn. — Austin Kleon

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

What to copy is a little bit trickier. Don't just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. — Austin Kleon

The important thing is that you show your appreciation without expecting anything in return, and that you get new work out of the appreciation. — Austin Kleon

We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies. - Walt Disney — Austin Kleon

One thing I've learned in my brief career: It's the side projects that really take off. By side projects I mean the stuff that you thought was just messing around. Stuff that's just play. That's actually the good stuff. That's when the magic happens. — Austin Kleon

Every artist gets asked the question, "Where do you get your ideas?" The honest artist answers, "I steal them. — Austin Kleon

Writer David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to "watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives." Amateurs fit the same bill: They're just regular people who get obsessed by something and spend a ton of time thinking out loud about it. — Austin Kleon

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

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

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

Everybody says they want artists to make money and then when they do, everybody hates them for it. The word sellout is spit out by the bitterest, smallest parts of ourselves. Don't be one of those horrible fans who stops listening to your favorite band just because they have a hit single. Don't write off your friends because they've had a little bit of success. Don't be jealous when the people you like do well - celebrate their victory as if it's your own. — Austin Kleon

Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas. — Austin Kleon

The reason to copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds. That's what you really want - to internalize their way of looking at the wold. If you just mimic the surface of somebody's work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more that a knockoff. — Austin Kleon

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

Show just a little bit of what you're working on. — Austin Kleon

When you get rid of old material, you push yourself further and come up with something better. — Austin Kleon

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

Your influences are all worth sharing because they clue people in to who you are and what you do - sometimes even more than your own work. — Austin Kleon

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

Always be reading. Go to the library. There's magic in being surrounded by books. Get lost in the stacks. Read bibliographies. It's not the book you start with, it's the book that book leads you to. Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Filmmaker John Waters has said, "Nothing is more important than an unread library." Don't worry about doing research. Just search. — Austin Kleon

What Now? Talk a walk Start your swipe file Go to the library Buy a notebook and use it Get yourself a calendar Start your logbook Give a copy of this book away Start a blog Take a nap — Austin Kleon

Marcel Duchamp said, "I don't believe in art. I believe in artists." This is actually a pretty good method for studying - if you try to devour the history of your discipline all at once, you'll choke. — Austin Kleon

If you want people to know about what you do and the things you care about, you have to share. — Austin Kleon

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

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

The best way to get approval is to not need it. — Austin Kleon

Complain about the way other people make software by making software. — Austin Kleon

Mental scrapbooks form our tastes, and our tastes influence our work. — Austin Kleon

The "lone genius" myth: An individual with superhuman talents appears out of nowhere at certain points in history, free of influences or precedent, with a direct connection to God or The Muse. — Austin Kleon

Imitation is about copying. Emulation is when imitation goes one step further, breaking through into your own thing. — Austin Kleon

Ideas from. What we do know is that we do not get them — Austin Kleon

Life is a lonely bussiness — Austin Kleon

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

Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by. — Austin Kleon

Show your work, and when the right people show up, pay close attention to them, because they'll have a lot to show you. — Austin Kleon

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

Franz Kafka wrote, "It isn't necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you." And Kafka was born a century before the Internet! — Austin Kleon

It's in the act of making things that we figure out who we are. — Austin Kleon

Do good work and share it with people. — Austin Kleon

Copying is about reverse-engineering. — Austin Kleon

If you ask yourself 'What's the best thing that happened today?' It actually forces a certain kind of cheerful retrospection that pulls up from the recent past things to write about that you wouldn't otherwise think about. — Austin Kleon

the only way to find your voice is to use it. — Austin Kleon

A calendar helps you plan work, gives you concrete goals, and keeps you on track. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld has a calendar method that helps him stick to his daily joke writing. He suggests that you get a wall calendar that shows you the whole year. Then, you break your work into daily chunks. Each day, when you're finished with your work, make a big fat X in the day's box. Every day, instead of just getting work done, your goal is to just fill a box. "After a few days you'll have a chain," Seinfeld says. "Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain." Get a calendar. Fill the boxes. Don't break the chain. — Austin Kleon

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

All the world's a stage. Creative work is a kind of theater. The stage is your studio, your desk, or your workstation. The costume is your outfit - your painting pants, your business suit, or that funny hat that helps you think. The props are your materials, your tools, and your medium. The script is just plain old time. An hour here, or an hour there - just time measured out for things to happen. — Austin Kleon

You can't find your voice if you don't use it. — Austin Kleon

Social media sites are the perfect place to share daily updates. Don't worry about being on every platform; pick and choose based on what you do and the people you're trying to reach. — Austin Kleon

Inertia is the death of creativity — Austin Kleon

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

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

And Conan O'Brien tried to be David Letterman but ended up Conan O'Brien. In O'Brien's words, It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. — Austin Kleon

You can turn your flow into stock. — Austin Kleon

Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don't out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying. — Austin Kleon

Part of the art of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don't look for them in the wrong places
Henry Miller
As you put yourself and your work out there, you will run into your fellow knuckleballers. These are your real peers-the people who share your obsessions, the people who share a similar mission to your own, the people with whom you share a mutual respect. There will only be a handful or so of them, but they're so, so important. Do what you can to nurture your relationships with these people. Show them work before you show anybody else. Keep them as close as you can. — Austin Kleon

We all love things that other people think are garbage. You have to have the courage to keep loving your garbage, because what makes us unique is the diversity and breadth of our influences, the unique ways in which we mix up the parts of culture others have deemed "high" and the "low."
When you find things you genuinely enjoy, don't let anyone else make you feel bad about it. Don't feel guilty about the pleasure you take in the things you enjoy. Celebrate them. — Austin Kleon

Stock and flow" is an economic concept that writer Robin Sloan has adapted into a metaphor for media: "Flow is the feed. It's the posts and the tweets. It's the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It's the content you produce that's as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. — Austin Kleon

Comments outnumber ideas. — Austin Kleon

You don't want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes. — Austin Kleon

Be nice. (The world is a small town.) — Austin Kleon

Obituaries are like near-death experiences for cowards. — Austin Kleon

Disconnect from anything and everything electronic. — Austin Kleon

The right constraints can lead to your very best work. My favorite example? Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat with only 236 different words, so his editor bet him he couldn't write a book with only 50 different words. Dr. Seuss came back and won the bet with Green Eggs and Ham, one of the bestselling children's books of all time. — Austin Kleon

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

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

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. 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. — Austin Kleon

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

The German writer Goethe said, "We are shaped and fashioned by what we love." "We — Austin Kleon

In the digital age, don't forget to use your digits! — Austin Kleon

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

A good pitch is set up in three acts: The first act is the past, the second act is the present, and the third act is the future. — Austin Kleon

Seeing yourself as part of a creative lineage will help you feel less alone as you start making your own stuff. I hang pictures of my favourite artists in my studio. They're like friendly ghosts. I can almost feel them pushing me forward as I'm hunched over my desk. — Austin Kleon

Take time to be bored. One time I heard a coworker say, When I get busy, I get stupid. — Austin Kleon

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

The only mofos in my circle are people that I can learn from. — Austin Kleon

The best way to vanquish your enemies on the Internet? Ignore them. — Austin Kleon

All you need is a little space and a little time - a place to work, and some time to do it; a little self-imposed solitude and temporary captivity. — Austin Kleon

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

On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something. Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing. — Austin Kleon

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

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

School is one thing. Education is another. The two don't always overlap. Whether you're in school or not, it's always your job to get yourself an education. — Austin Kleon

You might be scared to start. That's natural. There's this very real thing that runs rampant in educated people. It's called "impostor syndrome." The clinical definition is a "psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments." It means that you feel like a phony, like you're just winging it, that you really don't have any idea what you're doing. — Austin Kleon

You're ready. Start making stuff. — Austin Kleon

What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original. — Austin Kleon

Nothing is more paralyzing than the idea of limitless possibilities. — Austin Kleon