Colombian Culture Quotes

In Colombia, we have a lot of passion.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a newspaperman originally in Colombia. He talked about - and I agree - how everybody has a public life, a private life, and a secret life.

Europe is a very different place from my native country of Colombia and my children are growing up in a very urban setting which is nothing like when I was growing up and would be able to play barefoot in the street. But we have a very good life.

Before I cook, I always have to put on music that parents listened to while cooking. I remember waking up in the morning and seeing my dad making breakfast with music and cutting up the tomato and singing to it and just handling food with such care. So when I cook, I put on salsa, vallenato, cumbia, or anything that reminds me of Colombia.

Some people's parents listened to the Beatles... but my family is Alquimia, Celia Cruz, and Carlos Vives - this old, rich Colombian music. I loved hearing that while I was growing up.

There's so much more to Colombia than drug trafficking, you have no idea. They're a bit worn out by the association.

I've been following what's happening in Colombia because it's the country of my childhood.

In Colombia is where I discovered myself as a writer.

I had an uncle who took me to the ring in Medellin when I was 15 years old. In school, we had someone who taught us how to bullfight.

Juanes is one of the legendary, iconic Colombian artists. Growing up in Colombia, you can't really not have him on your radar. His songs are everywhere, and there's a statue of him. He's pretty big for Latin America, and for Colombia especially.

Of course for a Colombian girl it was always impossible to even imagine becoming an international popstar, but my dream became reality.

Well, in Colombia everybody's very voluptuous, and you're supposed to be. You don't want to be skinny when all of your cousins are mermaids. You grow up thinking that's how beauty is.

Baby names are a big debate in my family. Like true Colombian and Puerto Rican families, everybody and their mother is putting their two cents in - everything from Jose to Francisco to Victorio to Rain has been suggested.

Colombia is not how people think it is. We used to eat fish every Sunday at the beach. In the town where I grew up, people did not tell lies.

Travelling to make television programmes means I have some unusual food memories. In Pasto, Colombia, I was taken to a restaurant where I chose my meat for the evening from a cage of white rats. It tasted perfectly good - like rabbit.

Colombian culture has had a huge influence on me and taught me a different way of looking at things - I was always different from the people I went to school with, and I learned to embrace that.

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.

Colombian humor is very black, very sarcastic.

Hallucinatory - that's just the way everyday life is, in Colombia. All the time, you say to yourself, did I just see that?

Listen, I didn't know how to make coffee when I came to the United States. Because in Colombia the maids do it.

The people, the culture... there's so much magic in Colombia, so I feel like being a kid, being able to have that, being able to also call Colombia my home, it was such an important part of my introduction as an artist, too, because it's such a big part of my life as a human being.

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.

In Colombia, where I was born and raised, women like my mother considered their appearance and personal grooming a matter of principle. There was never an occasion where she didn't show up looking picture-perfect.

The way you pronounce words the Puerto Rico way, it's not really global for music. Colombians speak some of the best Spanish in the world. So having a Colombian next to me every time I write makes my music more international.

Colombian culture has a lot of music - it's in our blood; it's in our DNA.