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Steal Like an Artist Author: Austin Kleon Source: University-Library Mode: Started Date: 22nd Aug 2025
The 48 Laws of Power Author: Robert Greenee Source: University-Library Mode: Started Date: 22nd Aug 2025
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The Danger of a Single Story Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Source: YouTube Mode: Rewatched Date: 15th Aug 2025
I Saw Ramallah Author: Murīd Barghūthī Source: University-Library Mode: Excerpt-only (Book) Date: 15th Aug 2025
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Today, The Balance Of Stories (from Home and Exile) Author: Chinua Achebe Source: University-Library, Archive.org Mode: TBR -
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Quotes

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.

Jim Jarmusch

MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004

Primary source not accessible

"Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again"

Widely attributed to André Gide

For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the gamerer 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. 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.

Jonathan Lethem

The Ecstasy of Influence

Unofficial Primary source

Not by any means. More like a tasteful thief.
The only art I will ever study is stuff that I can steal from.

David Bowie

in response to "Since you put yourself first, do you consider yourself an original thinker?" From Playboy, September 1976.

Secondary source

Steal Like an Artist

by Austin Kleon

Summary so far

Bookmark at Page 23

Chapter 1: Steal Like An Artist

In his first chapter, Austin argues that, every creator is a sum of their influences and the environments they choose. Nothing is completely original. Instead, each of us is a mashup of what we choose to let into your life -may that be media, people, or ideas. We are the sum of our influences.

To be creative, and to come up the ideas you would find worth pursuing, the author advices to let go of the pressure to come up with something truly original. He argues that no idea is truly original. All creative work builds on what came before. Instead of trying to be original, figure out what is worth stealing, study it, move on, and repeat forever. As a creator, your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.

Actionable Advice #1: Build your influence tree: "Instead, chew on one thinker—writer, artist, activist, role model—you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people that thinker loved, and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you build your tree, it’s time to start your own branch."

Actionable Advice #2: Capture ideas everywhere: "Carry a notebook and a pen with you wherever you go. Get used to pulling it out and jotting down your thoughts and observations. Copy your favorite passages out of books. Record overheard conversations. Doodle when you’re on the phone."

You are, in fact, a mashup of what you chose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences.

Chapter 1, Page 11

Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.

Chapter 1, Page 14

Log:

  • 2025-08-22 : Chapter 1 complete
  • 2025-08-22 : Received Book through inter-library loan.

The Danger Of A Single Story

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children.
1:47
So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.
9:28
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.
10:13
All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
12:59
I’ve always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person.
13:45
The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.
13:55
So what if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide’s family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls “a balance of stories.”
14:09
Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
17:37
That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.
18:18