Talk to Steal Like an Artist like its author wrote you back.
Get the ideas that fit your life — not generic summaries.
- Chat with the book
- Audiobook-style main ideas
- Adapts to your life and goals
- Helps you take action
What it argues
Steal Like an Artist is Austin Kleon's short, illustrated guide to the creative process, built around the premise that nothing is truly original — all creative work is built from and inspired by what came before. The title is a provocation: stealing in the sense Kleon means is not plagiarism but the deep, transformative absorption of influences that makes genuinely new work possible. You can't create in a vacuum, and trying to be original before you've mastered your influences typically produces work that's neither original nor good.
The book's ten principles are brief and visual, delivered in a format that reflects the content: Kleon works with found text, cut-up poetry, and hand-lettered typography, and the book design itself is part of the argument for how creative constraints produce interesting work. The principles include: steal from the best, not the mediocre; don't wait until you know who you are to get started; write the book you want to read; use your hands; side projects are important; geography doesn't hold you back; be nice; be boring (it has good side effects on your creative output); creativity is subtraction.
What it gets right
- 1.
Nothing is completely original. All creative work builds on what came before. The task is not to invent from nothing but to steal well — from the right sources, deeply and transformatively.
- 2.
Build a creative genealogy: find the one artist you love most, find who they loved, and so on. This is your inheritance. Study it.
- 3.
Start making things before you feel ready. You discover who you are through the work, not before it.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Austin Kleon is an American writer, artist, and speaker who works with words and images. He created Newspaper Blackout, a form of found poetry made by blacking out newspaper articles, and has written three books in the creativity trilogy: Steal Like an Artist (2012), Show Your Work! (2014), and Keep Going (2019). He writes a popular weekly newsletter, The Weekly Dispatch, and gives talks at organizations including Pixar, SXSW, and the Economist. He lives in Austin, Texas.
