Austin Kleon

The Only Way to Keep Going

March 18, 2022

But Men Must Work and Women Must Weep, 1883 by Walter Langley, 
Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

“‘Art is the highest form of hope,’ said painter Gerhard Richter. But hope is not about knowing how things will turn out—it is moving forward in the face of uncertainty. It’s a way of dealing with uncertainty. ‘Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable,’ writes Rebecca Solnit. To have hope, you must acknowledge that you don’t know everything and you don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s the only way to keep going and the only way to keep making art: to be open to possibility and allow yourself to be changed.” 

—Austin Kleon, Keep Going