By Austin Kleon
Status:
Completed
Rating:
5 Stars
Quotes & Highlights
Editors Foreword
An inspiring guide to creativity in the digital age, Steal Like an Artist presents ten transformative principles that will help readers discover their artistic side and build a more creative life.
Nothing is original, so embrace influence, school yourself through the work of others, remix and reimagine to discover your own path. Follow interests wherever they take you—what feels like a hobby may turn into you life’s work. Forget the old cliché about writing what you know: Instead, write the book you want to read, make the movie you want to watch.
And finally, stay Smart, stay out of debt, and risk being boring in the everyday world so that you have the space to be wild and daring in your imagination and your work.
favourite bits.
“You’re ready. Start making stuff.”
“Do good work and share it with people.”
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
When you get rid of old material, you push yourself further and come up with something better
“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.”
“Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“In the first act, you get your hero up a tree. The second act, you throw rocks at him. For the third act, you let him down.”- George Abbott”
“Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don’t come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.”
“The best advice is not to write what you know, it’s to write what you like. Write the kind of story you like best- write the story you want to read.”
“School is one thing, education is another. The two dont always overlap. Whether you are in school or not, ts always your job to get yourself an education.”
“The computer brings out the uptight perfectionist in us- we start editing ideas before we have them.”
“Think about your favourite work and your creative heroes. What did they miss? What didn’t they make? What could’ve been made better? If they were still alive, what would they be making today? If all your favourite makers got together and collaborated, what would they make with you leading the crew?”
“Writing a page a day doesn’t seem like much, but do it for 365 days and you have enough to fill a novel.”
“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.”
“In the meantime, if you’re not into the world you live in, you can build your own world around you.[…]Surround yourself with books and objects that you love. Tape things up on the wall. Create your own world.”