Top 280 Austin Kleon Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.” – T. S. Eliot.”

— Austin Kleon

202. “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

203. “When in doubt, tidy up.”

— Austin Kleon

204. “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

205. “The minute you stop wanting something you get it.” – Andy Warhol Chain-smoking.”

— Austin Kleon

206. “When you open up your process and invite people in, you learn.”

— Austin Kleon

207. “If you draw,” said the cartoonist E. O. Plauen, “the world becomes more beautiful, far more beautiful.”

— Austin Kleon

208. “See something worth stealing? Put it in the swipe file. Need a little inspiration? Open up the swipe file. Newspaper reporters call this a “morgue file” – I like that name even better. Your morgue file is where you keep the dead things that you’ll later reanimate in your work.”

— Austin Kleon

209. “It’s for this reason that I read the obituaries every morning. Obituaries are like near-death experiences for cowards.”

— Austin Kleon

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “What are you working on?” Stick to that question and you’ll be good. Don’t show your lunch or your latte; show your work.”

— Austin Kleon

217. “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

218. “To fake a photograph, all you have to do is change the caption. To fake a painting, change the attribution.” – Errol Morris.”

— Austin Kleon

219. “What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere.”

— Austin Kleon

220. “I don’t know for sure what kinds of flowers I’m planting with my days on this planet, but I intend to find out, and so should you.”

— Austin Kleon

221. “If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.” – Kenneth Goldsmith “Stock.”

— Austin Kleon

222. “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

223. “Worry more about leaving things better than you found them.”

— Austin Kleon

224. “To be on brand is to be 100% certain of who you are and what you do, and certainly, in art and in life, is not only completely overrated, it is also a roadblock to discovery. Uncertainty is the very thing that art thrives on.”

— Austin Kleon

225. “Learn about money as soon as you can.”

— Austin Kleon

226. “There is no misery in art. All art is about saying yes, and all art is about its own making.” – John Currin.”

— Austin Kleon

227. “It helps to live around interesting people, and not necessarily people who do what you do. I feel a little incestuous when I hang out with only writers and artists, so I enjoy the many filmmakers, musicians, and tech geeks who live in Austin. Oh, and food. The food should be good. You have to find a place that feeds you – creatively, socially, spiritually, and literally.”

— Austin Kleon

228. “Words matter. Artists love to trot out the tired line, “My work speaks for itself,” but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself.”

— Austin Kleon

229. “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

230. “Being open and honest about what you like is the best way to connect with people who like those things, too.”

— Austin Kleon

231. “Nothing is more important than an unread library.” Don’t worry about doing research. Just search.”

— Austin Kleon

232. “If you want people to know about what you do and the things you care about, you have to share.”

— Austin Kleon

233. “I don’t want to know how a thirty-year-old became rich and famous; I want to hear how an eighty-year-old spent her life in obscurity, kept making art, and lived a happy life. I want to know how Bill Cunningham jumped on his bicycle every day and rode around New York taking photos in his eighties. I want to know how Joan Rivers was able to tell jokes up until the very end. I want to know how in his nineties, Pablo Casals still got up every morning and practiced his cello.”

— Austin Kleon

234. “Don’t be jealous when the people you like do well – celebrate their victory as if it’s your own.”

— Austin Kleon

235. “Find a scenius, pay attention to what others are sharing, and then start taking note of what they’re not sharing.”

— Austin Kleon

236. “When you get rid of old material, you push yourself further and come up with something better. When you throw out old work, what you’re really doing is making room for new work.”

— Austin Kleon

237. “Creativity is subtraction.”

— Austin Kleon

238. “Whatever we say, we’re always talking about ourselves.” – Alison Bechdel.”

— Austin Kleon

239. “Remember: Even The Beatles started as a cover band.”

— Austin Kleon

240. “Telling yourself you have all the time in the world, all the money in the world, all the colors in the palette, anything you want – that just kills creativity.”

— Austin Kleon

241. “You’ll either find the answer or you’ll come up with a better question.”

— Austin Kleon

242. “If you want followers, be someone worth following.”

— Austin Kleon

243. “The months leading up to World War II were some of the most terrible months in the life of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, as they “helplessly and hopelessly” watched events unfold. Leonard said one of the most horrible things was listening to Hitler’s rants on the radio – “the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful.”

— Austin Kleon

244. “There’s an intuition learned through our work. Teaching others doesn’t mean they can just go out and replicate it.”

— Austin Kleon

245. “You can’t control what sort of criticism you receive, but you can control how you react to it.”

— Austin Kleon

246. “The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from.”

— Austin Kleon

247. “The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act,” writes Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive Surplus. “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.”

— Austin Kleon

248. “We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.” – Walt Disney.”

— Austin Kleon

249. “Don’t feel guilty about the pleasures you take in the things you enjoy.”

— Austin Kleon

250. “When I’m stuck in the morning and I don’t know what to write about in my diary, I’ll modify the pros-and-cons list. I’ll draw a line down the middle of the page, and in one column I’ll list what I’m thankful for, and in the other column, I’ll write down what I need help with. It’s a paper prayer.”

— Austin Kleon