340 Quotes by Austin Kleon

Learn to speak. Learn to write. Use spell-check. You’re never “keeping it real” with your lack of proofreading and punctuation, you’re keeping it unintelligible.

Work that only comes from the head isn’t any good... You need to find a way to bring your body into your work... If we start going through the motions, if we strum a guitar, or shuffle sticky notes around a conference table, or start kneading clay, the motion kickstarts our brain into thinking.

If you want followers, be someone worth following.

You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again.

Writing a page each day doesn’t seem like much, but do it for 365 days and you have enough to fill a novel.

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

There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income. 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.

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

Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. I get some of my best ideas when I’m bored, which is why I never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts-it’s so boring, I almost always get good ideas. If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take 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.