STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST by AUSTIN KLEON (Book Notes)

STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST 10 THINGS NOBODY TOLD YOU ABOUT BEING CREATIVE by AUSTIN KLEON

Impressions:

After I finish reading the book SHOW YOUR WORK! by Austin Kleon, I was so overwhelmed and satisfied. So I decided to read STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST . I was absolute sure I'll have a great journey with the book.  

Favorite Lines and Quotes:

• when people give you advice, they’re really just 
  talking to themselves in the past.

Chapter 1: Steal Like an Artist

• The writer Jonathan Lethem has said that when people call something “original,” 
  nine out of ten times they just don’t know the references or the original sources 
  involved.
• It’s right there in the Bible: “There is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 
  1:9)
• As the 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.”
• 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.
• Don’t ask a question before you Google it. You’ll either find the 
  answer or you’ll come up with a better question.
• Filmmaker John Waters has said, “Nothing is more important than an unread library.”

Chapter 2: Don’t Wait Until You Know Who You Are to Get Started

• dramaturgy? It’s a fancy term for something William 
  Shakespeare spelled out in his play 
  As You Like It about 400 years ago:
• There are two ways to read it: 
  1. Pretend to be something you’re not until you are—fake it until you’re 
  successful, until everybody sees you the way you want them to; or 
  2. Pretend to be making something until you actually make something. 
  I love both readings—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.
• The writer Wilson Mizner said if 
  you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it’s 
  research.
• the cartoonist Gary Panter say, “If you have one person 
  you’re influenced by, everyone will say you’re the next whoever. But if you rip 
  off a hundred people, everyone will say you’re so original!”

Chapter 3: Write the Book You Want to Read

Chapter 4: Use Your Hands

Chapter 5: Side Projects and Hobbies Are Important

• If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take a 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.”
• 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.
• Tomlinson suggests that if you love different things, you just keep spending time 
  with them. “Let them talk to each other. Something will begin to happen.”
• A hobby is something creative that’s just for you. You don’t try to make money or get famous off it, you just do it because it 
  makes you happy. A hobby is something that gives but doesn’t take.

Chapter 6: The Secret: Do Good Work and Share It With People.

• The classroom is a wonderful, if artificial, place: Your professor gets 
  paid to pay attention to your ideas, and your classmates are paying to pay 
  attention to your ideas. Never again in your life will you have such a captive 
  audience.
• You’ll never get that freedom back again once people start paying you attention, 
  and especially not once they start paying you money.

Chapter 7: Geography is No Longer Our Master

• You’ll never get that freedom back again once people start paying you attention, 
  and especially not once they start paying you money.
• Travel makes the world look new, and 
  when the world looks new, our brains work harder.

Chapter 8: Be Nice. (The World is a Small Town)

• The important thing is that you show your 
  appreciation without expecting anything in return, and that you get new work out 
  of the appreciation.

Chapter 9: Be Boring. (It’s the Only Way to Get Work Done)

• Neil Young sang, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” I say it’s better to 
  burn slow and see your grandkids.
• As photographer Bill 
  Cunningham says, “If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do.”

Chapter 10: Creativity is Subtraction

Epilogue:

I really enjoyed the whole time of reading Steal Like an Artist 
10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon

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