Wolfgang Beltracchi quotes:

I went to the flea market in the morning and charged tourists money to take pictures of me. I looked pretty wild, with hair down to my waist, Indian robes, a floor-length fur coat. There must be lots of photos of me out there.

I lived on a houseboat in Amsterdam for a year. It was intense, and it's possible that I even had a few blackouts.

The trick is to paint a picture that doesn't exist, and yet that fits perfectly into an artist's body of work.

The interesting thing is that in everyday life, I fail to see the most ordinary things. I often stumble and sometimes I even fall over. But when I draw or look at a painting, I go into a sort of overdrive and just see things differently than other people.

Sometimes I smoked opium. And I also took LSD - for a while, quite a lot of LSD, in fact. But I never had any bad experiences. I stopped in 1985. I'd had enough, and I don't miss it, either.

I can paint anything. Leonardo? Of course. But why? You couldn't sell it.

I never decided to become an art forger. I was aware of my talent at an early age, and I used it foolishly. This developed over the years. In my heart, I don't see myself as a criminal.

I once went to a demonstration in Aachen against fare increases on public transport. A police officer pulled out a bunch of my hair, and there were a lot of violent beatings. That's when I thought to myself: You'd better leave it alone.

In a legal sense, I am a convicted criminal.

One is a criminal to some people and an artist to others. I can understand that. In a legal sense, I am a convicted criminal.

You can't paint pictures of love. You can only imagine them. So I suppose I don't need a painting by another artist. I have enough of my own.

Did I want to spend all my time working on a painting? No, I wanted to have fun, travel, meet women and live life.

Every philharmonic orchestra merely interprets the composer. My goal was to create new music by that composer. In doing so, I wanted to find the painter's creative center and become familiar with it, so that I could see through his eyes how his paintings came about and, of course, see the new picture I was painting through his eyes - before I even painted it.

Fame never interested me. I could have exhibited more of my own works in the 1970s, but I didn't want to. It's sort of like being a child. When you're finished with school, you have only one thing on your mind: to get out and experience life. Did I want to spend all my time working on a painting? No, I wanted to have fun, travel, meet women and live life.

For the cynic, art is defined through money. That, of course, is a very sad statement. But an artist is someone who does creative things.

I only painted when I felt like it and needed money. But it never really became a professional thing, even though the dealers would have liked that.

I think that the most important requirement is to capture the essence of a piece of art. You look at it, essentially absorb it, and you have to be able to understand it visually without having to think about how it was done. I was already able to do that as a child.

I wouldn't be ashamed to sell my own art for a lot of money.

Most forgers are caught because they tell the wrong person about what they do.

No one ever ordered anything from me. I painted because I wanted to.