O. R. Melling Quotes

The books you read as a young person are books that stay with you forever. I think that is the biggest privilege of writing for young people. You feel like you can help shape somebody.

Everyone has a story that they read when they were younger that influenced them.

I'm forever in debt to Nickelodeon. It made me who I am today.

You like to think with young adults that with your books, a little part of it has reached them and will stay with them. It is great to be part of an eight-year-old's world.

Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

My favourite author as a child and teenager, and who I still re-read now, is K. M. Peyton. She writes very truthfully; sometimes I'm not sure if I've actually done things or just experienced them in her books.

A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.

But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.

I hope children will be happy with the books I've written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.

I want to write books that can truly become a legacy and bring benefits to people.

I didn't have picture books - there weren't many around when I was a child.

As is said about most writers: on the one hand all I ever did from when I was a child was read, and I was a loner, which was furthered by my parents and my upbringing.

I can't imagine my life without books. My father was an electrical engineer, and my mother was a public school teacher. Books were an integral part of my childhood.

The 'Harry Potter' books had a huge impact on me.

Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.

My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.

I still think about the writers I loved when I was a kid.

That is the greatest gift my books have given me; what it means and has done for the kids.

Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.

I have a passion for children's literature. Young adult literature. I love it. I've always loved it.

It's not how many books you get through, it's how many books get through you.

One should never underestimate the power of books.

On Christmas morning when I was a child, my mother would leave a book wrapped at the foot of the bed, which was a hint that Santa had come. It was also her way of keeping us in bed a little longer before we went downstairs. So I've always associated books with happiness and gifts. And they are. I can't get enough of them.

Books are wonderful, but they aren't that powerful.