Oh, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Shakespeare should be thrown in there for good measure. Hard to pinpoint my own strengths. While I'm sure it has kept me from being more prolific, that little voice keeps me striving for quality. Other than that, I think I've got a good ear for the cadence of speech and an ability to produce dialogue that sounds authentic, even when it technically isn't. I've gotten a lot of kudos on making the characters in that sounding like they're from the past, without resorting to the old THOR-speak of throwing in thees, thous, and hasts.
Different rhythms can make as much difference in dialogue as different vocabulary.
Now that's a hard one. At least I think it was 154. I don't have my comics handy. It was just a really cool tale. After that, it seems to me that J.R.R. Tolkien was the biggest fire under me to put words on paper.