Top 280 Austin Kleon Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Inertia is the death of creativity. You have to stay in the groove. When you get out of the groove, you start to dread the work, because you know it’s going to suck for a while – it’s going to suck until you get back into the flow.”

— Austin Kleon

102. “Imitation is about copying. Emulation is when imitation goes one step further, breaking through into your own thing.”

— Austin Kleon

103. “Creativity is about connections, and connections are not made by siloing everything off into its own space. New ideas are formed by interesting juxtapositions, and interesting juxtapositions happen when things are out of place.”

— Austin Kleon

104. “I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. If you f – ing like something, like it.” – Dave Grohl.”

— Austin Kleon

105. “The trick is not caring what EVERYBODY thinks of you and just caring about what the RIGHT people think of you.” – Brian Michael Bendis.”

— Austin Kleon

106. “We have so little control over our lives. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on.”

— Austin Kleon

107. “If you want fans, you have to be a fan first.”

— Austin Kleon

108. “I think the same thing is true of our idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.”

— Austin Kleon

109. “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

110. “The only mofos in my circle are people that I can learn from.” – Questlove.”

— Austin Kleon

111. “Like one of his heroes, Tom Waits, whenever Yorke feels like his songwriting is getting too comfortable or stale, he’ll pick up an instrument he doesn’t know how to play and try to write with it. 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. “I’m an artist, man,” said John Lennon. “Give me a tuba, and I’ll get you something out of it.”

— Austin Kleon

112. “If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take a really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maira Kalman says, “Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.”

— Austin Kleon

113. “Pretend to be making something until you actually make something.”

— Austin Kleon

114. “To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping the artwork.”

— Austin Kleon

115. “Be ambitious. Keep yourself busy. Think bigger. Expand your audience. Don’t hobble yourself in the name of “keeping it real,” or “not selling out.” Try new things. If an opportunity comes along that will allow you to do more of the kind of work you want to do, say Yes. If an opportunity comes long that would mean more money, but less of the kind of work you want to do, say No.”

— Austin Kleon

116. “The art of holding on to money is all about saying no to consumer culture.”

— Austin Kleon

117. “You can turn your flow into stock.”

— Austin Kleon

118. “There’s only one rule I know of: You’ve got to be kind.” – Kurt Vonnegut.”

— Austin Kleon

119. “Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

— Austin Kleon

120. “When you ignore quantitative measurements for a bit, you can get back to qualitative measurements.”

— Austin Kleon

121. “Art that only comes from the head isn’t any good.”

— Austin Kleon

122. “Find the most talented person in the room, and if it’s not you, go stand next to him.”

— Austin Kleon

123. “Marcel Duchamp said, “I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.”

— Austin Kleon

124. “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities,” said Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki. “In the expert’s mind, there are few.”

— Austin Kleon

125. “Inertia is the death of creativity. You have to stay in the groove.”

— Austin Kleon

126. “As my friend Hugh MacLeod says, “The best way to get approval is to not need it.”

— Austin Kleon

127. “First, you have to figure out who to copy. Second, you have to figure out what to copy.”

— Austin Kleon

128. “Eat breakfast. Do some push-ups. Go for long walks. Get plenty of sleep.”

— Austin Kleon

129. “We don’t know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is that we do not get them from our laptops.” – John Cleese.”

— Austin Kleon

130. “We all have the opportunity to use our voices, to have our say, but so many of us are wasting it.”

— Austin Kleon

131. “Colin Marshall says: “Compulsive avoidance of embarrassment is a form of suicide.” If you spend your life avoiding vulnerability, you and your work will never truly connect with other people.”

— Austin Kleon

132. “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

133. “1. Pretend to be something you’re not until you are – fake it until you’re successful, until everybody sees you the way you want them to; or 2. Pretend to be making something until you actually make something. I love both readings – you have to 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

134. “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

135. “Don’t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.”

— Austin Kleon

136. “Unless you are actually a ninja, a guru, or a rock star, don’t ever use any of those terms in your bio. Ever.”

— Austin Kleon

137. “The songwriter Nick Lowe says, “You start out by rewriting your hero’s catalog.” And you don’t just steal from one of your heroes, you steal from all of them. The writer Wilson Mizner said if you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it’s research. I once heard the cartoonist Gary Panter say, “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

138. “A lot of people are so used to just seeing the outcome of work. They never see the side of the work you go through to produce the outcome.” – Michael Jackson.”

— Austin Kleon

139. “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

140. “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

141. “The writer Jonathan Lethem has said that when people call something “original,” nine out of ten times they just don’t know the references or the original sources involved.”

— Austin Kleon

142. “The trick is to find a day job that pays decently, doesn’t make you want to vomit, and leaves you with enough energy to make things in your spare time. Good day jobs aren’t necessarily easy to find, but they’re out there.”

— Austin Kleon

143. “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

144. “In the digital age, don’t forget to use your digits!”

— Austin Kleon

145. “Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing.”

— Austin Kleon

146. “When you find something 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

147. “The computer brings out the uptight perfectionist in us – we start editing ideas before we have them. The cartoonist Tom Gauld says he stays away from the computer until he’s done most of the thinking for his strips, because once the computer is involved, “things are on an inevitable path to being finished. Whereas in my sketchbook the possibilities are endless.”

— Austin Kleon

148. “Every artist gets asked the question, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ The honest artist answers, ‘I steal them.’”

— Austin Kleon

149. “The German writer Goethe said, “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.” “We.”

— Austin Kleon

150. “Keep your own list, or get an account with an email newsletter company like MailChimp and put a little sign-up widget on every page of your website.”

— Austin Kleon