Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon
How strongly I recommend this book: 7 / 10
Date read: May 28, 2025
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Summary
This was a wonderful book that helped me understand a crucial idea: to truly learn from our heroes, we must move beyond simply mimicking their style. Instead, we should steal the thinking and perspective behind their work. The goal is to see the world through their eyes. One of the most important points for me was that your unique voice is often discovered in the gap between who you’re trying to emulate and who you actually are. It’s in this failure to be a perfect copy that your true self emerges and defines your work.
There were also so many other great points about improving creativity. I think the idea of sharing your process, not just your product, was incredibly important. The book also emphasizes embracing boredom and not just writing what you know, but making the art you want to see. It’s a powerful reminder that your own passion and curiosity are your best guides.
Favorite Quotes and Chapter Notes
I went through my notes and captured key quotes from all chapters below.
P.S. – Highly recommend Readwise if you want to get the most out of your reading.
Highlights and Notes
“The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from.”—David Bowie
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.”
The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.
Marcel Duchamp said,“I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.” This is actually a pretty good method for studying— if you try to devour the history of your discipline all at once, you’ll choke. Instead, chew on one thinker— writer, artist, activist, role model— you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people that thinker loved, and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you build your tree, it’s time to start your own branch.
See something worth stealing? Put it in the swipe file. Need a little inspiration? Open up the swipe file. Newspaper reporters call this a“morgue file”— I like that name even better. Your morgue file is where you keep the dead things that you’ll later reanimate in your work.“It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.”—Mark Twain
Ask anybody doing truly creative work, and they’ll tell you the truth: They don’t know where the good stuff comes from. They just show up to do their thing. Every day.
In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying. We’re talking about practice here, not plagiarism— plagiarism is trying to pass someone else’s work off as your own. Copying is about reverse- engineering. It’s like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works.
Even The Beatles started as a cover band. Paul McCartney has said,“I emulated Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis. We all did.” McCartney and his partner John Lennon became one of the greatest songwriting teams in history, but as McCartney recalls, they only started writing their own songs“as a way to avoid other bands being able to play our set.” As Salvador Dalí said,“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
The writer Wilson Mizner said if you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it’s research. I once heard 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!”
What to copy is a little bit trickier. Don’t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes. 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 world. If you just mimic the surface of somebody’s work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more than a knockoff.
Conan O’Brien tried to be David Letterman but ended up Conan O’Brien. In O’Brien’s words,“It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.”
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. The same principle applies to your life and your career: Whenever you’re at a loss for what move to make next, just ask yourself,“What would make a better story?”
Think about your favorite work and your creative heroes. What did they miss? What didn’t they make? What could’ve been made better? If they were still alive, what would they be making today? If all your favorite makers got together and collaborated, what would they make with you leading the crew? Go make that stuff.
It wasn’t until I started bringing analog tools back into my process that making things became fun again and my work started to improve.
The computer is really good for editing your ideas, and it’s really good for getting your ideas ready for publishing out into the world, but it’s not really good for generating ideas. There are too many opportunities to hit the delete key. The computer brings out the uptight perfectionist in us— we start editing ideas before we have them.
I have two desks in my office— one is“analog” and one is“digital.” The analog desk has nothing but markers, pens, pencils, paper, index cards, and newspaper. Nothing electronic is allowed on that desk. This is where most of my work is born, and all over the desk are physical traces, scraps, and residue from my process.(Unlike a hard drive, paper doesn’t crash.) The digital desk has my laptop, my monitor, my scanner, and my drawing tablet. This is where I edit and publish my work.
Take time to be bored. One time I heard a coworker say,“When I get busy, I get stupid.” Ain’t that the truth. 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 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.”
It’s so important to have a hobby. 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. While my art is for the world to see, music is only for me and my friends. We get together every Sunday and make noise for a couple of hours. No pressure, no plans. It’s regenerative. It’s like church.
This is actually a good thing, because you want attention only after you’re doing really good work. There’s no pressure when you’re unknown. You can do what you want. Experiment. Do things just for the fun of it. When you’re unknown, there’s nothing to distract you from getting better. No public image to manage. No huge paycheck on the line. No stockholders. No e- mails from your agent. No hangers- on. You’ll never get that freedom back again once people start paying you attention, and especially not once they start paying you money. Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts. Use it.
It’s a two- step process. Step one,“do good work,” is incredibly hard. There are no shortcuts. Make stuff every day. Know you’re going to suck for a while. Fail. Get better. Step two,“share it with people,” was really hard up until about ten years ago or so. Now, it’s very simple:“Put your stuff on the Internet.”
Step 1: Wonder at something. Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you. You should wonder at the things nobody else is wondering about. If everybody’s wondering about apples, go wonder about oranges. The more open you are about sharing your passions, the closer people will feel to your work.
People love it when you give your secrets away, and sometimes, if you’re smart about it, they’ll reward you by buying the things you’re selling. When you open up your process and invite people in, you learn.
You don’t put yourself online only because you have something to say— you can put yourself online to find something to say. The Internet can be more than just a resting place to publish your finished ideas— it can also be an incubator for ideas that aren’t fully formed, a birthing center for developing work that you haven’t started yet.
Learn to code. Figure out how to make a website. Figure out blogging. Figure out Twitter and social media and all that other stuff. Find people on the Internet who love the same things as you and connect with them. Share things with them. You don’t have to share everything— in fact, sometimes it’s much better if you don’t. Show just a little bit of what you’re working on. Share a sketch or a doodle or a snippet. Share a little glimpse of your process. Think about what you have to share that could be of some value to people. Share a handy tip you’ve discovered while working. Or a link to an interesting article. Mention a good book you’re reading.
“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”—Howard Aiken
Your brain gets too comfortable in your everyday surroundings. You need to make it uncomfortable. You need to spend some time in another land, among people that do things differently than you. Travel makes the world look new, and when the world looks new, our brains work harder.
You’re only going to be as good as the people you surround yourself with. In the digital space, that means following the best people online— the people who are way smarter and better than you, the people who are doing the really interesting work. Pay attention to what they’re talking about, what they’re doing, what they’re linking to.
If you truly love somebody’s work, you shouldn’t need a response from them.(And if the person you want to write to has been dead for a hundred years, you’re really out of luck.) So, I recommend public fan letters. The Internet is really good for this. Write a blog post about someone’s work that you admire and link to their site. Make something and dedicate it to your hero. Answer a question they’ve asked, solve a problem for them, or improve on their work and share it online. Maybe your hero will see your work, maybe he or she won’t. Maybe they’ll respond to you, maybe not. The important thing is that you show your appreciation without expecting anything in return, and that you get new work out of the appreciation.
That’s why I put every really nice e- mail I get in a special folder.(Nasty e- mails get deleted immediately.) When those dark days roll around and I need a boost, I open that folder and read through a couple e- mails. Then I get back to work. Try it: Instead of keeping a rejection file, keep a praise file. Use it sparingly— don’t get lost in past glory— but keep it around for when you need the lift.
The worst thing a day job does is take time away from you, but it makes up for that by giving you a daily routine in which you can schedule a regular time for your creative pursuits. Establishing and keeping a routine can be even more important than having a lot of time. 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. The solution is really simple: Figure out what time you can carve out, what time you can steal, and stick to your routine. Do the work every day, no matter what. No holidays, no sick days. Don’t stop. What you’ll probably find is that the corollary to Parkinson’s Law is usually true: Work gets done in the time available.
The artist Saul Steinberg said,“What we respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her limitations.” It’s often what an artist chooses to leave out that makes the art interesting. What isn’t shown versus what is. It’s the same for people: What makes us interesting isn’t just what we’ve experienced, but also what we haven’t experienced. The same is true when you do your work: You must embrace your limitations and keep moving. In the end, creativity isn’t just the things we choose to put in, it’s the things we choose to leave out.