Top 280 Austin Kleon Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Imitation is about copying. Emulation is when imitation goes one step further, breaking through into your own thing.”

— Austin Kleon

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Austin Kleon

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Austin Kleon

110. “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

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

— Austin Kleon

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

— Austin Kleon

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

— Austin Kleon

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

— Austin Kleon

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

— Austin Kleon

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

— Austin Kleon

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

— Austin Kleon

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

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

— Austin Kleon

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

— Austin Kleon

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

— Austin Kleon

123. “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

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

— Austin Kleon

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

— Austin Kleon

126. “If you want to change your life, change what you pay attention to. “We give things meaning by paying attention to them,” Jessa Crispin writes, “and so moving your attention from one thing to another can absolutely change your future.”

— Austin Kleon

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

— Austin Kleon

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Austin Kleon

141. “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

142. “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

— Austin Kleon

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

— Austin Kleon

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

— Austin Kleon

145. “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

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

— Austin Kleon

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

— Austin Kleon

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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