Art is theft”) and Igor Stravinsky (“Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal”), I’ve always stolen from the people I admire – not plagiarized, mind you, but stolen bits of ideas and stylistic influences. If you steal widely enough, after all, your models are inevitably changed and the result is in the end completely yours. Kleon cites André Gide to this point, in a quotation I love: “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

Dig into almost every overnight success story and you’ll find about a decade’s worth of hard work and perseverance.

Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.

If I'd waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started "being creative," well, I'd still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it's in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.

In the end, creativity isn’t just the things we choose to put in, it’s the things we choose to leave out.

Usually, when we talk about creativity, it's about self-expression, which is great, but for work to be art or design, there has to be someone on the other end. The audience makes the work come alive.

Be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else--that's how you'll get ahead.