I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
Don DeLillo
Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.
Francoise Sagan
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
George Santayana
If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
Louis Armstrong
Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.
Wynton Marsalis
I can turn on some jazz guitarist, and he won't do a thing for me, if he's not playing electrically. But Jeff Beck's great to listen to.
Ritchie Blackmore
Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.
F. Scott Fitzgerald