Who do you love?

Me, I love Richard Laymon.

Julie Anne Peters
Alex Sanchez
Larry Niven

Ursula Le Guin
Tim Powers
Robertson Davies
Peter Dickinson
Poppy Z Brite
etc., etc...

John Steinbeck,HG Wells,Dickens,Shakespeare,not into poetry though i do love John Betjeman and the war poets.

Authors I can think of at the moment are Carl Sagan, Oliver Sacks, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Simic, Umberto Eco, Walt Whitman, A.R. Ammons, Neil Gaiman, Douglas Adams, Tom Robbins, Roald Dahl. And Tove Jansson and Louis Sachar.

I had to revive this thread - looking for something happy to dwell on, and this is the funnest kind of listmaking.

Although there are individual books I prefer more than any of this author's, my favourite body of work belongs to Kurt Vonnegut.

Seeing your list gives me some authors I probably need to look into, Felix.

My list...

Haruki Murakami
Koji Suzuki
Carl Sagan
Douglas Adams
Tom Robbins
Chuck Palahniuk
David Sedaris
Robert Anton Wilson
1/2 of Stephen King
Brian Greene (as long as he's not on about string theory)
Bertrand Russell
Kurt Vonnegut
Can I count Hugh Laurie, since he's only written one novel so far?  It was really good, if that counts.

If we're including graphic works...

Alan Moore
Grant Morrison
Warren Ellis
Tsugumi Ohba
Rumiko Takahashi
Saki Hiwatari
CLAMP

That's all, off the top of my head.  I'm probably forgetting some and I specifically excluded someone because he specifically doesn't mention authors who are important to his work.

william gibson
china mieville
chuck palahniuk
hunter s thompson
philip k dick

probably in that order.