Patrick deWitt Quotes

I was actually born in New York. We lived there until I was three so I grew up watching Sesame Street and hearing the accent. You are a sponge at that age, soaking everything up.

If you can get a twelve year-old kid to go listen to Thelonius Monk, what more do you want? Do you want a big pile of cash, too? That's a home run for me.

I thought, If I'm gonna run a jazz club, if I've got Miles Davis' posters in my bar, I should at least know what his horn sounds like.

If you listen to a lot of music, it gradually seeps into your consciousness or your unconsciousness and comes out in your music.

You see an absolutely brilliant film later, as an adult, and you walk out thinking about what to have for dinner. Whereas something like Jaws winds up having a huge effect on me. If only my parents had been taking me to Kurosawa films when I was eight, but no.

I grew up with the Grand Ole Opry, Dottie West, Conway Twitty, Buck Owens... not realizing it was influencing me as much as it was.

I grew up listening to hipster jazz and classical records... we went and watched ballet and orchestras - lots of cool stuff. Which I'm really grateful for - it's pretty nice being introduced to that when you're little.

Since I was a kid, music has been a huge part of my life. My parents had a pretty solid vinyl collection and exposed me to some amazing artists.

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

The point is that the arts are important enough to have influenced the greatest minds and talents we know. Albert Einstein said that if he were not a physicist, he would probably be a musician.

Just like zillions of children, album covers educated and informed me, and certainly did I later transpose organically, rather than by intent, those principles both in fashion design and photography.

The kid at 9 or 10 who knows who Billie Holiday is... that's the coolest thing ever.

I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on miserable paper. That was, for many years, what art was for me. But from those miserable black-and-white reproductions, I got something, something unmistakable.

Of course, to publish something, you have to write it, polish it, then hire out the line editing, copy editing and cover design. After which, you pick your way through the minefield of conforming to the differing requirements of Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords, or hire someone to do it for you.

I have been an art director, a book designer, a book-jacket designer and an interior designer.

The exposure I have had to beautiful materials across the world, from Japan to Italy, enables me to pull design ideas together. This, combined with years of historical research, has created a great fountain of ideas for me.

I still like to listen to the people that I came of age on.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

I read 'Whiplash,' and I wanted to do it.

I had a Stuart Davis poster growing up.

I grew up in Shanghai 'til I was 10 or 11, with one year in Tibet. When I was 5 or 6 years old, the American radio station came to Shanghai, and I used to love bebop and jazz, but I didn't know where it came from.

I listen to anything anyone gives me. I always go back to a few basic favorites. I can always listen to Django Reinhardt and hear something I haven't heard before. I like to listen to Art Tatum and Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Those are guys who never seem to run out of ideas.

I have been a huge, huge fan of music ever since I was a kid. Anything to do with music inspires me.

I was exposed to jazz and blues and gospel and country music and rock, and I was the only kid I knew who knew about that stuff.

I grew up watching American films, listening to American music, and it's a big contribution to the rest of the world. I mean, American jazz, for me, is the best thing culturally that America has produced.