Music (pop music criticism, too), literature (post-modern novelists mostly), art (especially like Post-impressionists), logic puzzles, and playing cards (Hearts and Poker, good at neither). Thai food and New England Clam Chowder. Collared shirts, khakis, and Doc Martens. Is it too shallow to mention...chicks?
If we're talking dead people: William Shakespeare, Vladimir Nabokov, John Lennon, Martin Luther King Jr., Mohanndas Gandhi. As far as the living go, and just so you don't think I'm totally stuffy, how about Jennifer Connelly?
My tastes are very broad. Rather than bring out a long scroll of favorites, let's just say my most played albums lately are: Late Registration by Kanye West, Separation Sunday by the Hold Steady, The Very Best of Rosanne Cash and Little Creatures by Talking Heads. I've also been playing lots of Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver...fantasizing about the great pianist I coulda been, maybe?
Let's talk directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Bunuel, Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Michael Powell, and why not Steven Spielberg? This merits another long list in itself, but my all time favorite movie is Vertigo. The only movie I've seen more is It's a Wonderful Life, which gets me crying everytime. I'd list Brokeback Mountain, but isn't it uncool to mention recent movies?
My lifestyle affords me very little time to watch much TV, so when I do actually catch a series, I usually wolf it all down at once on DVD. Most recent example: Lost, of which I recently saw the entire first season, but nothiing past that. So no, I don't know what's in the hatch, or who Ana Lucia is. And is it true someone else dies in the second season?
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Rabbit, Run by John Updike, Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, and Falconer by John Cheever would probably be the top five, the five that mean the most to me personally. Other favorite writers and such include Philip Roth, Haruki Murakami, Zadie Smith, Truman Capote, Nikolai Gogol, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Don Delillo. My big current fave is Ian McEwan, whose Atonement is the best book I've read in the last five or so years. And Shakespeare is the man.
Aside from my literary and musical heroes, and aside from great religious leaders and such, I'd say someone like Jimmy Carter -- very few people are making the matter of peace a life's mission, but he's one of them. I loved how he mentioned wiretapping at Coretta Scott King's funeral, with George W. Bush right behind him. Way to stick it to the man!