Just for fun. Any author, any genre. Markus Zusak used to be my total hero. Now it's Patrick Ness and Neil Gaiman.
I don't pay a lot of attention to style (it either "works for me" or it doesn't) but I love the way Margaret Atwood has managed to combine genre and literary in her work. She writes historical, she writes dystopic, she writes fantasy, she writes whatever the hell she wants and still gets treated as a literary writer because she's Margaret Fucking Atwood. I'd love to be able to do that!
There's not really anyone specifically. My voice/style isn't much different than the authors in my genre that I look up to. I do wish I could be as prolific as Nora Roberts or as good at world-building as J.K. Rowling, though. Both are definite weaknesses of mine.
It would be cool to write like a mix between Clive Barker and Ray Bradbury. But I guess you are stuck with little old me.
Robinson Jeffers (a poet), Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, Herman Melville, James Joyce when he's trying. Myself when I'm at my very best.
I wish I had the imagination of C.S Lewis, especially after reading The Great Divorce. Such talent that man had. I also wish that my style was more like Sartre. I honestly think I have a few similarities with his style but it's still my own work. For better or worse.
That's easy. Drop your speech marks and dialogue tags and you're there! I wish I could write with the clarity and (apparent) ease of Stephen Gregory - an author none of you have heard of.
Iain Banks, of course, who writes just a bit like Douglas Adams at times. Hunter Thompson, but anyone who writes like Hunter Thompson is just derivative of Hunter Thompson, so that's a wash. Yeah, Banks.
I envy Stephen R. Donaldson's ability to write in a very baroque, elaborate style and make it work, and also his pacing and sense of drama, where he can set up a status quo like a row of dominos and then knock the lot of them down with a single line that changes everything. I also wish I could write naturalistic dialogue like Stephen King, and have his knack for writing truly hateful but believable antagonists.
I guess I would want to write more like Franz Kafka. I've always have had something of a Twilight Zonish mindset.
Edgar Allan Poe is my favorite. I am fascinated by his mind...I have always enjoyed the dark side of literature
I think @izzybot formulated it perfectly, I want to write as I, but better. (As I just started it's not that difficult.)
I've always loved James Michener's ability to make the locale a character in his stories as well as his ability to find goodness in scoundrels (Pasquinel) and weaknesses in heroes (Joe Cable). I love Dickens' use of language and the sometimes playful way he names his characters. I love E. M. Forster's ability to portray multiple conflicted viewpoints in one piece of fiction (A Passage to India). Hemingway not only put me in the boat with Santiago, he made me pray with him. C. P. Snow's masterful depictions of politics on a very person level, seamlessly blending in details of time and place. Delderfield's use of language inflections to do the same. Lisa Gardner's ability to maintain gut-wrenching tension across the entire span of a novel. James Thurber turning small town life and personal foibles into smiles that last a week. O. Henry's irony leaving one with a deep sigh and a shake of the head.
Gustave Flaubert. Although I seriously doubt I would ever be able to reach his level of perfection. Still, one is allowed to dream...
Ken Kesey for me. I have read Sometimes a Great Notion many times because of his ability to have multiple narrators. His dialog and delivery are as honest to real life as I have ever seen in the written word. Plus also like the fact that for his books he as done and experienced many of the things he has written about. I make my living as a logger. Sometimes a Great Notion is a book about a logging family and it is one of the few things that I have ever read that dealt with it, that are accurate. I have battled unions, bad weather, family helpers and jealous competitors. His ability to describe the things I know first hand with accuracy, gives him a lot of credibility in the areas in which I have none. He represents the greatest truth in writing. "Write what you know."
Hmmm, I do studies on writers whose work's interest me (I try to apply one element of their writing into mine.) Tennyson, I am envious of his musicality in term of writing in Meter. - Cliver Barker - I love how his prose is simple and easier to read, his stories are enjoyable to read, yet, they are full of subtext, theme, allusions, and symbolism that doesn't bog down the story.