Authors From The United States

"If there was a secret formula for becoming known, I would give it to you. But there's only one not-so-secret formula that I know: Do good work and share it with people."

"Always be reading. Go to the library. There's magic in being surrounded by books. Get lost in the stacks. Read bibliographies. It's not the book you start with, it's the book that book leads you to."

"The great thing about dead or remote masters is that they can't refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work."

"A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we're incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve."

"If you ever find that you're the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room."

""Dumpster diving" is one of the jobs of the artist— finding the treasure in other people's trash, sifting through the debris of our culture, paying attention to the stuff that everyone else is ignoring, and taking inspiration from the stuff that people have tossed aside for whatever reasons. [...] All it takes to uncover hidden gems is a clear eye, an open mind, and a willingness to search for inspiration in places other people aren't willing or able to go."

"In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what's really important to them. Nothing is more paralyzing than the idea of limitless possibilities."

"Human beings want to know where things come from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work effects how they value it."

"Our culture mostly celebrates early successes, the people who bloom fast. But those people often wither as quickly as they bloom. [...] I don't want to know how a thirty-year-old became rich and famous; I want to hear how an eighty-year-old spent her life in obscurity, kept making art, and lived a happy life."

"Art is not only made from things that "spark joy." Art is also made out of what is ugly or repulsive to us. Part of the artist's job is to help tidy up the place, to make order out of chaos, to turn trash into treasure, to show us beauty where we can't see it."

"Austin Kleon is one of the brightest new minds on the creative landscape. [...] With simple yet profound insights, and an array of his amazing images, he casts aside old stereotypes of the creative life and tells what it's really like."

"Art is supposed to make our lives better. This is as true for the making of the art as it is for the art itself. If making your art is ruining anyone's life, including your own, it is not worth making."

"Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you. First you must protect it, and then you must point it in the right direction. [...] What you choose to pay attention to is the stuff your life and work will be made of."

"It's always a mistake to equate productivity and creativity. They are not the same. In fact, they're frequently at odds with each other: You're often most creative when you're the least productive."

"Let go of the thing that you're trying to be (the noun), and focus on the actual work you need to be doing (the verb). Doing the verb will take you someplace further and far more interesting."

"Creativity is about connection — you must be connected to others in order to be inspired and share your own work — but it is also about disconnection. You must retreat from the world long enough to think, practice your art, and bring forth something worth sharing with others. You must play a little hide-and-seek in order to produce something worth being found."

"Everyone who's turned their passion into their breadwinning knows this is dangerous territory. One of the easiest ways to hate something you love is to turn it into your job: taking the thing that keeps you alive spiritually and turning it into the thing that keeps you alive literally."

"When you feel like you've learned whatever there is to learn from what you're doing, it's time to change course and find something new to learn so that you can move forward. You can't be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again."

"It is actually true that life is all about "who you know". But who you know is largely dependent on who you are and what you do, and the people you know can't do anything for you if you're not doing good work."

"The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on. What we work on and how hard we work on it. It might seem like a stretch, but I really think the best thing you can do if you want to make art is to pretend you're starring in your own remake of Groundhog Day: Yesterday's over, tomorrow may never come, there's just today and what you can do with it."

"We all go through cycles of disenchantment and re-enchantment with our work. When you feel as though you've lost or you're losing your gift, the quickest way to recover is to step outside the marketplace and make gifts. There's nothing as pure as making something specifically for someone special."

"The minute you learn something, turn around and teach it to others. Share your reading list. Point to helpful reference materials. [...] Take people step-by-step through part of your process."

"If you're only pointing to your own stuff online, you're doing it wrong. [...] If you want to get, you have to give. If you want to be noticed, you have to notice. Shut up and listen once in a while."

"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."

"In India I have found great beauty of a kind far too rare in the United States. Instead of the hard, taut, anxious faces, so common in America, I have seen many there that were calm, open, untroubled, serene. I have seen dignity and grace of movement derived not from training but from inner peace and wholeness."

"It is important to understand that surveillance capitalists are impelled to pursue lawlessness by the logic of their own creation. Google and Facebook vigorously lobby to kill online privacy protection, limit regulations, weaken or block privacy-enhancing legislation, and thwart every attempt to circumscribe their practices because such laws are existential threats to the frictionless flow of behavioral surplus."

"(...) This structural requirement of economies of action turns the means of behavioral modification into an engine of growth. At no other time in history have private corporations of unprecedented wealth and power enjoyed the free exercise of economies of action supported by a pervasive global architecture of ubiquitous computational knowledge and control constructed and maintained by all the advanced scientific know-how that money can buy."

"(...) Stalin took the floor for a toast as the room fell silent. “Our tanks are worthless if the souls who must steer them are made of clay. This is why I say: The production of souls is more important than that of tanks.… Man is reshaped by life itself, and those of you here must assist in reshaping his soul. That is what is important, the production of human souls. And that is why I raise my glass to you, writers, to the engineers of the soul.”6 The authors assembled around Stalin that evening raised their glasses to his toast, persuaded perhaps by memories of less adaptive colleagues already exiled or executed (...)"

"Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior."

"We celebrated the new digital services as free, but now we see that the surveillance capitalists behind those services regard us as the free commodity. We thought that we search Google, but now we understand that Google searches us. We assumed that we use social media to connect, but we learned that connection is how social media uses us. …We’ve begun to understand that “privacy” policies are actually surveillance policies.… The Financial Times reported that a Microsoft facial recognition training database of 10 million images plucked from the internet without anyone’s knowledge and supposedly limited to academic research was employed by companies like IBM and state agencies that included the United States and Chinese military.… ….Privacy is not private, because the effectiveness of these and other private or public surveillance and control systems depends upon the pieces of ourselves that we give up—or that are secretly stolen from us."

"Automated machine processes not only know our behavior but also shape our behavior at scale. With this reorientation from knowledge to power, it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal is to automate us. ... Just as industrial society was imagined as a well-functioning machine, Instrumentarian society is imagined as a human simulation of machine learning systems: a confluent hive mind in which each element learns and operates in concert with every other element. In the model of machine confluence, the “freedom” of each individual machine is subordinated to the knowledge of the system as a whole. Instrumentarian power is to organize, herd, and tune society to achieve a similar social confluence, in which group pressure and computational certainty replace politics and democracy."

"Forget the cliché that if it’s free, “You are the product.” You are not the product; you are the abandoned carcass. The “product” derives from the surplus that is ripped from your life."

"During the last two decades, the leading surveillance capitalists—Google, later followed by Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft—helped to drive this societal transformation while simultaneously ensuring their ascendance to the pinnacle of the epistemic hierarchy. They operated in the shadows to amass huge knowledge monopolies by taking without asking, a maneuver that every child recognizes as theft. Surveillance capitalism begins by unilaterally staking a claim to private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Our lives are rendered as data flows…."

"Illustrators are word people who happen to draw. We work with one foot in a book, the other stuck in a paint pot. Our shoes are a disgrace."

"Genius is rare as turtle fangs, but talent is common enough."

"The experienced illustrator subscribes to the principle of the application of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. Should inspiration whisk down your chimney, be at your table. The first ten thousand drawings are the hardest. Put another way, you have ten thousand bad drawings within and should expel them as quickly as possible."

"...when we have more minds concerned, any challenge shrinks proportionally. The solution to our greatest problems may simply be involvement."

"The teacher is the designer of the learning process a choreographer of discovery."

"The finest design for society will not be one worked up by specialists but a design created by the people themselves to fit their needs."

"Many things that if you’re attractive it for us become ugly to us when we gain deeper knowledge: a building that took an oppressed class to build, a tool that will not hold an edge, clothes that shrink or fade on Washington. Are these beautiful? That way we answer this question is momentous impact for our concept of society."

"Initially what is important is to be able to successfully make a useful object over which the maker can exclaim, with pleasure and amazement, 'I made this myself!"

"When as a society we fail to help all people have confidence in their ability to create, we are doubly wasteful. First, we lose from society’s reservoir the creative potential of so many, and second we see those who are left out lose well-being and emotional security."

"We have found that it's a good idea to read as many authors and as many different genres as possible. That way, we can learn more about writing and it gives us ideas to try different things."

"Draw from your imagination and read whatever gets you excited."

"Indeed, social scientists have done such a terrible job that it’s hard to see how the field can be repaired. They wanted the false results they got, and they still do. I’m sure their descendants will as well. Isn’t heritability grand?"

"Diana’s powerful analysis of the complex human interaction of the writers never stays merely abstract, but is infused with a very thorough knowledge of what can be discovered of the group and its often eccentric members."

"We are curious, we ask questions, we read and research and connect with others who know more than we do. Then we fumble to record the answers the best we can, and we discover that we understand things better because we try to write about them with candor and clarity. Questions just keep bubbling up all the time."

"The efficacy regulations on drugs, economists have found in countless studies, have delayed the introduction of new drugs by years and added hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of developing a typical new drug."

"I noted that one reason we buy so much health care is that the price to us is artificially low; if we paid the full price for health care, we would make better life-style decisions on exercise, smoking, and foods and would need less health care."

"Unfortunately, not content to enforce its monopoly power over what new drugs get produced, the FDA also seeks to limit doctor’s uses of legal drugs for uses not specified on the label."