“One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is how the change in values makes the survival of the old values, where they do survive, all the more striking. There are pockets of the old bullfighting world that exist more or less intact, both in Spain and elsewhere.”

Your accuracy in reading the bull is a weapon, maybe your most important weapon, against all the bull’s weapons. On the other hand, you’re human, you have the human tendency to read into the bull things which may not actually be there.

I was a bullfighter. I’d like to see the tradition continue. I’m sorry that Catalonia is robbing itself of a tradition that belongs in Catalonia.

Bullfighting has some of the elements of a sport or contest, and in the United States most people think of it as a sport, an unfair sport.

I suppose that what I would want to acknowledge is that perhaps the tension, the crucial tension, isn’t necessarily between the view of bullfighting as a tradition versus as an art form, but between the values inside the ring and the values outside the ring.

So then it comes back to whether the suffering and cruelty is justified by its place in a tradition that has deep roots in the culture. At present, the view in Catalonia apparently is that it does not.

I’m good at killing, I’m known as a bullfighter who kills well, and that I can kill well, that I can compete technically with my male peers in my technique in killing, gives me satisfaction.

You kill, it’s part of your world as a bullfighter, it’s a natural part of your world, and then you leave that world and it becomes unnatural.

It’s almost impossible to imagine bullfighting abolished from Spain entirely. Values do change, though.

Bullfighting is anachronistic – you enter into a bullring and you’re leaving behind the values of the world outside the ring.

A bull will try to outwit you. It will stop and hook when the last thing you expect from it is that it will stop and hook.

In one era the majority puts its faith and sympathy with the bullfighter, in another with the bull.

Animals are complicated and so is the animal-rights opposition. It’s hard to read motives in animals, and hard to read motives in politics.

If you fear something, walk into it.

Madrid reacting with the forceful protection of bullfighting as an art form is an example of the survival of the old values.

I never took pleasure in seeing a bull die. Relief, but certainly not pleasure.