All forms of art and written expression.
Anyone who knows the difference between "their" and "there".
Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, The Ramones, Wilco, The Decemberists, The Cure, Caetano Veloso, Frank Sinatra, The Who, Jeff Buckley, Joni Mittchell, The Flaming Lips, The Velvet Underground, Beck, Eisley, Roy Orbison, The Weakerthans, Kraftwerk, New Order, Mazzy Star, Joy Division, Air, Ella Fitzgerald, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Sex Pistols, Gilberto Santa Rosa, Pearl Jam, Kurt Weill, Blonde Redhead
Andrei Tarkovsky's "Zerkalo", Francois Truffaut's "The 400 Blows", Federico Fellini's "8 1/2", Spike Jonze and Andy Kaufman's "Adaptation", Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon", Dziga Vertov's "The Man With the Movie Camera", Carol Reed's "The Third Man". Kevin Smith tickles my funnybone (so to speak).
Lost, The Simpsons, Seinfeld and anything involving Jon Stewart and/or Stephen Colbert. Anything else is bullshit.
"Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut, "The Dice Man" by George Cockcroft, "Cien Años de Soledad" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Death in Venice" by Thomas Mann, "The Catcher in the Rye" by JD Salinger, "On the Road" and "The Dharma Bums" by Jack Kerouac, "Women" by Charles Bukowski.
I tend to deify and lionize the people I admire artistically, so Tom Waits and Elvis Costello are up there, as well as Tarkovsky. My dad is a personal hero of mine, as cliché as it sounds.