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

- Fernando Botero

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

- Fernando Botero

I describe in a realistic form a nonrealistic Reality.

- Fernando Botero

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 bea…

- 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.

- Fernando Botero

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

- Fernando Botero

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 bea…

- Fernando Botero

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

- Fernando Botero

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 …

- Fernando Botero