340 Quotes by Austin Kleon

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.

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.

It’s in the act of making things that we figure out who we are.

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.

Maira Kalman says, “Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.

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.

Remember: Even The Beatles started as a cover band.

Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine.

Filmmaker John Waters has said, “Nothing is more important than an unread library.