Austin Kleon Quotes

dress for the job you want, not the job you have, and you have to start doing the work you want to be doing.

"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.

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.

If you feel like you have two or three real passions, don't pick and choose between them. Don't discard. Keep all your passions in your life.

The reason to copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds. That's what you really want - to internalize their way of looking at the wold. If you just mimic the surface of somebody's work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more that a knockoff.

As Salvador Dalí said, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

You’ll never get that freedom back again once people start paying you attention, and especially not once they start paying you money.

You're ready. Start making stuff.

Ironically, really good work often appears to be effortless. People will say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” They won’t see the years of toil and sweat that went into it.

Show just a little bit of what you’re working on.

Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don't out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.

Copying is about reverse-engineering.

Eat breakfast. Do some push-ups. Go for long walks. Get plenty of sleep.

Complain about the way other people make software by making software.

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.