Steal Like An Artist: The Book

25 *MORE* QUOTES TO HELP YOU STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Back in February I made a post about all art as collage. Since then, folks have sent me lots of stuff, so now I present
25 more quotes to help you steal like an artist
I know a good joke when I steal one. - Paul Mooney quoting Milton Berle
Bad artists copy. Good artists steal. Art is theft. - Pablo Picasso
We are shaped and fashioned by what we love. - Goethe

Writers are like vacuum cleaners, sucking up all that we can see and hear and read and think and feel and articulate, and everything that everyone else within earshot can hear and see and think and feel. - Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, p. 177
I’m a writer who likes to be influenced. - Kenneth Koch
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing. - Salvador Dali
The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. - Mark Twain, writing to Helen Keller, who was accused of plagiarism
Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known. -Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all. - Abraham Lincoln
You know how you scratch away at a lottery ticket to see if you’ve won? That’s what I’m doing when I begin a piece. I’m digging through everything to find something. Scratching can look like borrowing or appropriating, but it’s an essential part of creativity. It’s primal, and very private. It’s a way of saying to the gods, Oh, don’t mind me, I’ll just wander around in these back hallways… and then grabbing that piece of fire and running like hell. - Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit
Rip something off that you love….Find something that speaks to you…and build it yourself. - Jim Coudal
I have to admit that my favorite songs have been put together by amateurs. My father used to say, Most folk music is the product of plagiarism. That’s what I learned from Woody Guthrie. You borrow a tune here, then change it a little bit. You borrow some words there. Then add to them. You don’t claim to be original. - Pete Seeger
That’s how art history and literary history gets made: by living artists connecting with the past. - Jeet Heer
Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent. - Emerson
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. - Ecclesiastes 1
Though it’s unlikely you’ll write something nobody has ever heard of, the way you have a chance to compete is in the way you say it. - Amy Hempel
You have to be different, great, or first. - Loretta Lynn
Ideas on their own are just not that important. It’s incredibly rare that someone comes up with an idea so unique, so protectable that the success story writes itself. Most ideas are nothing without execution. - David Heinemeier Hansson
All the signs were in the air all around with ambient music in the mid 1970s, and other people were doing a similar thing. I just gave it a name. Which is exactly what it needed. A name. A name. Giving something a name can be just the same as inventing it. By naming something you create a difference. You say that this is now real. Names are very important. - Brian Eno
It was an idea that was already out there, but I shined a spotlight on it, named it, and everybody got it right away. - Sam Martin
Plagiarize! Let no one else’s work evade your eyes, Remember why the good Lord made your eyes. - Tom Lehrer, Lobachevsky
During the course of this long volume I have undoubtedly plagiarized from many sources–to use the ugly term that did not bother Shakespeare’s age. I doubt whether any criticism or cultural history has ever been written without such plagiary, which inevitably results from assimilating the contributions of your countless fellow-workers, past and present. The true function of scholarship as a society is not to stake out claims on which others must not trespass, but to provide a community of knowledge in which others may share.”<br /> - F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941)
The principle of collage is one of the central principles of art in this century and it seems also to me to be one of the central principles of literature. - Donald Barthelme
The visual artist can deal with almost every kind of material, even sound, but the writer deals with only one kind of material: sentences. The solution, therefore, is to treat sentences as though they were found objects….The illogic, the apparent absurdity, of a Rauschenberg collage or a Barthelme story makes people impatient, because it seems to violate ordinary habits of perception and understanding. But we experience the arbitrary juxtaposition of radically disparate materials every day, when we look at the front page of a newspaper. - Louis Menand
Finally, some words of caution
if you must write prose and poems the words you use should be your own dont plagiarise or take on loans cos there’s always someone, somewhere with a big nose, who knows and who trips you up and laughs when you fall… - The Smiths, Cemetery Gates
Read more

Steal Like An Artist

David Shields Reality Hunger
The Ecstacy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem

Newspaper Blackout

Category: NOTES ON WRITING AND DRAWING

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8 Comments on “25 *MORE* QUOTES TO HELP YOU STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST”

  1. Austin Kleon Says:
    June 2nd, 2010 at 9:49 am

    Bruno from Brazil sends in another one:

    “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
    - Sir Isaac Newton

  2. Adele Jackson Says:
    June 2nd, 2010 at 8:37 pm

    Hi Austin, Love these quotes !!

    Here’s another quote about collage…

    Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says.. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross.
    –Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

  3. Matt Thomas Says:
    June 2nd, 2010 at 9:59 pm

    “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, all is transformed.”
    —Antoine Lavoisier, 18th-century chemist, qtd. in The Substance of Style

  4. Austin Kleon Says:
    June 3rd, 2010 at 10:19 am

    Adele + Matt – awesome quotes, thanks!

  5. Austin Kleon Says:
    June 3rd, 2010 at 10:45 am

    Doak over on the Newspaper Blackout Facebook page added this one:

    “Somebody’s Calling Me” was written in the middle of the night, and usually I’m pretty purposeful about my grand theft, like stealing the guitar sound from [Robert] Fripp for “All I Want” and stuff like that. “Somebody’s Calling Me” was written in my sleep, and the original was just the piano and the beat and the singing. And that was it, because I was on Xanax and asleep, and that’s what I did in the middle of the night. But then when I was working on it, putting in the little synth sounds and stuff like that, I was totally like, “Ha ha, this sounds like ‘Nightclubbing.’ Let’s put some crazy synth sounds on it.” Once you find out it sounds like that, you just have to allow yourself to use what you like, or else you’re trying to hide it—and that’s usually a way to make a boring song. I’d rather have a song I like that sounds like another song, than a song that I’m hoping nobody notices sounds like another song that I’m not that into.
    –James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem

  6. B. Baltimore Brown Says:
    June 14th, 2010 at 1:28 pm

    Ecclesiastes 1:9 (New American Standard Bible)

    9(A)That which has been is that which will be,
    And that which has been done is that which will be done.
    So there is nothing new under the sun.

  7. Karen Blackwood Says:
    June 15th, 2010 at 9:19 am

    Your blog is “Fresh” and inspiring! It reminds me that it’s not only all right to look at others work for inspiration but it’s actually part of the process!

  8. Ashlie Says:
    August 11th, 2010 at 10:39 pm

    I just found your blog and have spent the last hour pouring through your insights. I found that it hits at the heart of an artist trying to find the right place for their creativity and how best to fuel that drive.
    Thanks, i’ll be back again.

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