Austin Kleon

First, you figure out what’s worth stealing, then you move on to the next thing

French writer André Gide put it, “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

The artist is a collector.

I’m a boring guy with a nine-to-five job who lives in a quiet neighborhood with his wife and his dog. That whole romantic image of the creative genius doing drugs and running around and sleeping with everyone is played out. It’s for the superhuman and the people who want to die young. The thing is: It takes a lot of energy to be creative. You don’t have that energy if you waste it on other stuff.

Almost all of the people I look up to and try to steal from today, regardless of their profession, have built sharing into their routine

Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals; it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds

“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

It sounds a little extreme, but in this day and age, if your work isn’t online

It sounds a little extreme, but in this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist

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