Joseph Benavidez Quotes

You know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know that if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning. Sometimes it's important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it.

I've never dreamed of a story idea. I have such boring dreams.

Sometimes good stories are created while documenting dreams.

Sometimes, I get ideas from dreams. Often, my stories are based on adventures that I, or my friends, have actually lived.

A story in your head isn't a story. It's just a daydream until you actually write it down. So write it down.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

Writing for children is my... that's my medium, you know, and the medium is the picture book, which is a very particular kind of book. I try to give children what I would give anybody, you know. I become interested in something. I find something fascinating. It has to fascinate me, and then I want to give it to them.

There was a time when I read a script and I just got excited about the possibilities.

I learnt to love reading. And then I started scribbling stories, and I liked that even more.

I don't remember my dreams too much. I hardly have ever gotten ideas from nighttime dreams. But I love daydreaming and dream logic and the way dreams go.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about.

At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper. But a lot of it is imagination. It's not based on real people.

The multilevel, the conscious and the unconscious, is natural when I write scripts, when I come up with ideas and stories.

There are a lot of good stories out there, but I haven't found too many great scripts.

I dream crazy vivid dreams. Like, entire movies. And sometimes I write songs about them.

I've had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I've often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

Each book first begins with a little idea.

I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.

I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'