Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

Austin Kleon is the author, illustrator, and authorial voice of Steal Like An Artist. The book is written in a casual, friendly tone and is ostensibly in Kleon’s own voice, as if he were giving a friend advice. Before Chapter 1, he writes that “all advice is autobiographical” and “this book is me talking to a previous version of myself” (1). This accounts for the familiar and friendly tone of Kleon’s writing but also deliberately promotes the premise of the book as autobiographical. Kleon’s focus on art as an iterative process and his engagement with the digital space are influenced by his own experience. Steal Like an Artist started as an invited talk called “How to Steal Like an Artist” for Broome Community College in Binghamton, New York. After the talk, he “edited the slides and [his] speech into a blog post and published it on [his] website” (Kleon, Austin. LitHub, 2022). The blog post went viral overnight, crashing his website and garnering the attention of editors asking if he’d turn the post into a book. When it came to making the book, he practiced what it preaches, “stealing bits and pieces from all over and pulling them together to try to make something new” (Kleon), working in the afternoons and nights after his day job: a practice he advises in Chapter 9.