Juan Antonio Bayona Quotes

When I was small, I was always thinking about different worlds in my head.

I picture my books as movies when I get stuck, and when I'm working on a new idea, the first thing I do is hit theaters to work out pacing and mood.

Being a poet, the advantages of dyslexia are many, affording me sensitivity to the musical nuances of language and the ability to juggle complicated ideas and narratives simultaneously.

With any kind of sci-fi, the imagination continues, and the world exists, and you create that in your own mind, and it lives in you.

If anybody reads a story in a magazine or book, different pictures compete in their minds.

I spent my childhood watching every scary movie that Hollywood ever made. And I think that gave me the best education for storytelling. It also made me want to reproduce the scary moments that I felt, sitting in a theater at the age of 5.

When I write something that would have made me laugh as a 10-year-old, or would have scared me or would have excited me, I know I'm onto something.

It's a fact that kids watch TV. But if you think back, when you watched cowboy movies, you would go out and play cowboys. TV and movies motivate people.

I never really got nightmares from movies. In fact, I recall my father saying when I was three years old that I would be scared, but I never was.

When I was very little my mother would read to me in bed. She gave me a fascination for stories, and for the music in words.

I'm honestly kind of scared of horror films. My girlfriend always tries to expose them to me. Being in a scary movie and seeing all the fake blood and stuff definitely takes away from the magic and kind of humanizes scary movies to me now, though.

When I was a little kid, I loved horror films. I always liked being scared.

When I was a kid, I read books that made me laugh but also made me shiver in terror. I wanted to make books that made other people feel the same way.

My dad would tell me bedtime stories, and he used to always leave them open-ended and finish at a crucial point with the words, 'dream on'. Then it was my responsibility to finish the story as I was drifting off to sleep. We would call them dreaming stories.

One of the nice things about books as opposed to television and movies to some extent is it's not a passive entertainment. People really do get involved, and they do create, and they do have their own visions of what different characters look like and what should happen. It's great - it means their brains are working.

As a writer, I always think about who my prototype actors are, in my brain. It's helpful, as a writer, to think about that.

To act with a tennis ball and imagine it's a tentacle, or if you're in some kind of wilderness film and you go, 'Okay, we can't have a grizzly bear here, but imagine when you step over the rock there there's a grizzly bear.' I don't know. They're tough moments.

I've always loved the rush you get from watching a really scary movie, but I never watch them alone. It's fun to turn out the lights and scream and clutch someone's hand and spill the popcorn all over the place and hide under each other.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

People have asked me a lot, 'What comes first? The pictures or the story? The story or the picture?' It's hard to describe because often they seem to come at the same time. I'm seeing images while I'm thinking of the story.

I love stories. I loved stories when I was a kid. My mom read stories to me all the time.

My parents both work in publishing, and I was a bright, academic kind of kid, and I read a lot of books, and when you read a lot, I guess the muscle that gets exercised is where you can hear the voices in your head. You can turn words into pictures and into sounds and into colours and smells.

I like fantasy. I've always been the kind of kid who likes to dream about other things I could be and exotic situations I could be in.

When I was a child, we used to look forward to the end of the day when we would hear another ten minutes of a story.

Ever since I was really little, I've had characters that were in my mind.