Quotes from Fernando Botero

I often think about death, and it saddens me to leave this world and not be able to paint more. I love it so much.

All the animals I've painted always have a relationship with man. I have been told that part of the knowledge of the human anatomy comes from animals.

People say, 'What a discipline, painting so much.' I say, 'No, I love it.' Nothing amuses me as much as my work. To have discipline would be not to paint.

Before anything else, I started painting bulls and matadors. That was my initiation to paint.

I'm the most Colombian of the Colombians, even though I've lived 47 years outside of Colombia. I've lived 13 years in New York, and I never did a painting about New York. I've lived in France more than 30 years, and I've never painted Paris.

I love art so much because of curiosity. At the start of a painting, I know 10 percent of what the painting will be, and then I have to improvise the whole thing.

I have seen Colonial churches since I was very small, Colonial painting and polychrome sculpture. And that was all I saw. There was not a single modern painting in any museum, not a Picasso, not a Braque, not a Chagall. The museums had Colombian painters from the eighteenth century and, of course, I saw Pre-Columbian art. That was my exposure.

Bullfights are a very cultural thing. I know many people think it's cruel, but so many things are cruel. Hunting, the electric chair, wars. These are all cruel things as well.

Man needs music, literature, and painting - all those oases of perfection that make up art - to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

The circus leaves a sweet memory.

In the '60s, I did many satirical portraits of dictators.

My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it's good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it.

My work is a self-portrait of my mind, a prism of my convictions.

You paint what you know best; what you went through as a teenager and child. My world is the one I got to know in Medellin; I never paint anything else other than that.

Art is a spiritual, immaterial respite from the hardships of life.

Man needs spiritual expression and nourishing... even in the prehistoric era, people would scrawl pictures of bison on the walls of caves.

Bullfights have so much color. Not just the matador but also the bull, the arena, and the public. It's all very festive.

The circus is a global theme. It exists in all parts of the world - maybe not in Africa, but it exists in Asia in all parts. In Latin America, it's difficult to find a person who hasn't gone to the circus.

There's nothing more superficial to do than to paint a beautiful woman. The most beautiful portraits in art were of ugly women. If you paint Brigitte Bardot, it's a disaster. Sunsets, you have to stay away from sunsets. You paint a sunset, you are in great danger.

Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter's identity, his style, his conviction, and then color is just a gift to the drawing.

An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it.

I had wanted to be a sculptor throughout life, but to do so, I had to stop painting.

Art should be an oasis: a place or refuge from the hardness of life.