Fernando Botero quotes:

When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.

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.

Sculptures permit me to create real volume One can touch the forms, one can give them smoothness, the sensuality that one wants.

I work more now perhaps because I know that there is so little time left.

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.

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

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

The richness of an artist is the fusion of influences that have shaped his life and work.

I create my subjects somehow visualizing them in my style. I start as a poet, put the colors and composition down on canvas as a painter, but finish my work as a sculptor taking delight in caressing the forms.

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,

I'm a tireless worker; I don't consider painting a work, it is not an obligation, I do it for pleasure; I haven't found anything that amuses me more than painting.

I describe in a realistic form a nonrealistic Reality.

A painted landscape is always more beautiful than a real one, because there's more there. Everything is more sensual, and one takes refuge in its beauty. And man needs spiritual expression and nourishing. It's why even in the prehistoric era, people would scrawl pictures of bison on the walls of caves. Man needs music, literature, and painting-all those oases of perfection that make up art-to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life.

A painted landscape is always more beautiful than a real one, because there's more there. Everything is more sensual, and one takes refuge in its beauty.