As far as music was concerned, Bellairs had no particular talent but could more or less carry a tune and would sometimes, we’re told, sing stanzas of his favorite song while strumming an imaginary guitar. Bellairs had a strong interest in folk music, as well as classical, with Richard Dyer-Bennett being one of his favorite singers. Dyer-Bennett visited the Notre Dame campus February 21, 1958, and we’re told Bellairs later met Dyer-Bennett, escorting him around either Notre Dame or another one of the campuses where Bellairs later taught. Myers remembers The Vicar of Bray being one of Bellairs’ favorite songs, one about a churchman who survives the several waves of English religious wars by shifting his allegiances in order to keep his job.

Some of Bellairs’ other favorite music included popular classical pieces such as La donna e mobile from Rigoletto and the Ride to Hell from Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust, performed by the Boston Symphony and conducted by Charles Munch. Myers says that he and Bellairs, along with others in their social group, wore the grooves off that record during their undergraduate days. And although one could hardly classify him as a folk artist, Tom Lehrer was another Bellairs favorite, whose first album, featuring Fight Fiercely, Harvard, was played endlessly.

Other favorites included an early comedy LP by Peter Sellers, featuring the fractured tune Wouldn't it be Loverly sung by Sellers in his deadpan Indian accent; Beyond the Fringe, with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Jonathan Miller; and the Michael Flanders and Donald Swann review At the Drop of a Hat, particularly the song "Have Some Madiera, m'Dear!"

Have some madeira, m'dear, I've got a small cask of it here
And once it's been opened, you know it won't keep
Do finish it up, it will help you to sleep
Have some madeira, m'dear, it's really an excellent year
Now if it were gin, you'd be wrong to say yes
The evil gin does would be hard to assess
Besides it's inclined to affect me prowess
Have some madeira, m'dear

Bellairs first heard another favorite song several years later on Chicago's great cultural station, WFMT. Myers says the song, a mock-prohibition ballad called It's Rum, By Gum! and sung by a deep-voiced contralto named Barbara Dane, was one John "scoured the record stores of Chicago" for until he finally obtained a copy:

We never eat fruitcake because it has rum
And one little bite turns a man to a bum,
We never eat cookies, because they have yeast,
And one little bite turns a man to a beast.

Away, away with rum by gum,
With rum by gum, with rum by gum!
Away, away with rum by gum!
The song of the Temperance Union!

John says in the 1985 article that his favorite type of pet is a cat. Other than that, all we know is that after he was divorced he and his son lived in Haverhill with their cat, Edna.

Bellairs described his political affiliation as Democrat [Something About the Author, 1971] although growing up in Marshall he may have considered himself to be a Republican, perhaps atypical for Catholics of that era, notes Myers.

"I get the idea that this was planted in his family by his grandfather, though I'm not sure. In any event, John had a particular dislike of the then-reigning governor of Michigan, G. Mennen "Soapy" Williams (1949-1960), though I'm not sure exactly why."

Despite the predominant Republican tilt of the Notre Dame student body, Myers says that Bellairs switched to liberal Democratic side early on at college. "He had all the usual attitudes that that implies: reverence for Adlai Stevenson, fervent support for civil rights, loathing for McCarthy, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover, and so on. I particularly remember his fondness for Frank O'Malley's wisecrack when Richard Nixon visited the campus in the fall of 1956. O'Malley released his class that afternoon so they could see Nixon with the remark that, 'It's not every day that the Beast of the Apocalypse comes to the campus.'"

Bellairs' enthusiasm for Democratic politics peaked with the election of John F. Kennedy but, like most Democrats at the time, harbored a subliminal resentment of Johnson and his ascendancy after the assassination. "Nevertheless he fervently supported LBJ in 1964 and loathed Goldwater. His 'Ramses the Second' cartoon that he sent to my mother that year was a satire on Goldwater. However Bellairs' anti-war fervor solidified fairly early in the Vietnam period and by 1968 he was solidly in the 'Dump Johnson' camp." Myers says that Bellairs mentioned once that if Johnson hadn't dropped out of the race gotten and was re-nominated, he would have had to vote for him in the general election. Naturally not the street demonstration type, Bellairs wrote to the Fitschens in June 1968 saying that attended a Eugene McCarthy rally where Alan Arkin read from Catch 22.

Another politician Bellairs was not enthusiastic about was Hubert Humphrey, who spoke at a commencement ceremony at the College of St. Teresa when Bellairs taught there. Later, Myers recalls Bellairs' amusement over a 'Dump the Hump' sign at a rally.

"Strangely, I don't remember any specific attitude he had about Robert Kennedy, though we to some extent regarded the Kennedys as a unified entity in that era. However, John could do a hilarious, spot-on imitation of Bobby's speaking style, capturing perfectly his Boston accent."

Myers says that Bellairs' dislike of Nixon strengthened after the election of 1969. After that, Bellairs and Myers did not see each other often and can only assume Bellairs continued to vote Democratic, if at all. "He once mentioned that the Democrats and their candidates made no impression on him at all. In general, his enthusiasm for politics had waned and had hardened into cynicism."

John Bellairs acquired his reading habits, as we all do, in his youth with his love for literature and history originating from books originally belonging to one of his grandfathers. Bellairs told Edward Recchia that his books feature a number of elderly, eccentric characters befriending the young heroes "because my grandfather was very close to me when I was little; he taught me to read and was a model of kindness and friendship that inspires me even now" [You Can Take the Boy out of Michigan, But..., 1987].

Myers describes John as "a slow but very retentive reader" who as a teenager read a lot of science fiction, with Ray Bradbury being a particular favorite. Bellairs even assigned Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles to one of his classes at the all-girls college in Winona. Myers also thinks Bellairs came to Notre Dame already a H.P. Lovecraft fan.

He read Shakespeare, as any literature major would have, and liked J.R.R. Tolkien "very much." In a 1983 autobiographical sketch, Bellairs confessed to "read[ing] and re-read[ing] Dickens, Henry James, history by C.V. Wedgwood and Garrett Mattingly, and the ghost stories of M.R. James" [Fifth Book of Junior Authors, 1983].

When asked if he liked the Stephen King brand of horror, Bellairs said no, replying that, "some people think horror is to be grossed-out by these really disgusting things. But for me, horror is suggestion and what might happen and the old-fashioned haunted house movies" [Author's Imagination Stuck at 10, 1990].

Of M.R. James, from whose ghost stories Bellairs occasionally borrowed motifs to work into his own fiction, Bellairs said that he agreed "that spooky tales are most effective when the ghastly things happen to people who are going about their business in an ordinary" [Locus, 1991].

Other favorites include James Thurber, who Myers believes was one another of Bellairs' absolute favorite authors, "which is not a bad choice at all." Another favorite was Will Cuppy's marvelous sendup of European history, 1066 And All That.

For all his young-adult writing, Bellairs said in 1990 that he was not a big children's book reader [Author's Imagination Stuck at 10, 1990].

Bellairs probably did not care much for the work of author Saul Bellow, if only that this legendary Chicago-based writer snubbed The Pedant and the Shuffly back in 1968. It was reported by a few of John's friends that Bellow entered Staver's Bookstore in Chicago during an autographing session, picked up a copy, riffed through it and gave it a derogatory snort before moving on.

However the author Bellairs disliked the most was John Updike. Gerald Kadish says that Bellairs once gave him a walking tour of Newburyport, New Hampshire, a "very well-informed tour about specific houses and John was negative only about John Updike's house; John loathed John Updike, both the man and his writing."