Austin Kleon

And I met her at a reading, and I got to go to the bar with her because I knew the person who... I knew this guy named Dan Sean, who's a writer in Cleveland, and he had invited her to speak at Oberlin.

And I went to hang out with her at a bar with a couple other people.

I just got to sit there and kind of be in her...

aura or like whatever you want to call it.

I mean, I ran at least the first half of my career off of the fumes of that meeting.

I mean, it was very much like this person is activated to the world in a way that I want, I want, I'll have what she's having.

You know, it's like the, the, when Harry met Sally line, I'll have what she's having, you know?

And it's like, I think the older I get, the more I think about the work that I do, I think about it as the transmission of energy, uh,

that might sound very vague to people, but the way I think of it is you spend all of this energy thinking about these ideas, looking at the world, paying attention, gathering all this stuff up and you stuff it, you pack it into this book.

And this book is just a lump of matter, basically.

It's just like a lump of coal or something.

It's like compressed and packed down.

And then the only way all that energy gets activated again is

is when the reader opens that book back up they take their energy and their attention and it's like a catalyst it activates all that energy you put into the book again and your energies either sync up or they don't you know you said something that i when i was younger i'd have rolled my eyes at which is

You know, you took all the things that I was thinking, you just put it into words.

And I used to go, oh yeah, you had all these thoughts that I had and like I put them into words.

But now I realize that's the most beautiful compliment a reader can give you.

Because now that I'm a little bit more mature, I'm still pretty immature.

But now I've come, I'm like, that is what the writer does.

The writer takes what everyone's thinking.