Tracey Emin Quotations

There's different kinds of love, and I'd never experienced that kind of totally platonic love. All the love I've experienced has always been a kind of deal, and now, as I get older, I realise that there's this other love out there.

What is truth? Truth doesn't really exist. Who is going to judge whether my experience of an incident is more valid than yours? No one can be trusted to be the judge of that.

I really love animals. My cat is my little soul mate. He's not just a cat, he's my friend.

I know I'm supposed to say ageing doesn't bother me, then suddenly you're like, 'Yeah, I care about it, I really worry about it. I'm getting old. I'm old!'

I am fiercely independent and I probably wouldn't be if it wasn't for the way in which I was brought up

I'm not trying to find another thing that's wrong with me, but I'm such a nice person, and I have a couple of drinks and I'm really good fun and then I'm really not fun

Maybe I don't believe things myself, as well. Truth is such a transient thing

All the mistakes I've ever made in my life have been when I've been drunk. I haven't made hardly any mistakes sober, ever, ever.

I'd make a good friend, not mother. I'm too selfish. I think a lot of mothers are selfish and they end up having children, but I don't want to put some small tiny person through that.

If I didn't want to work for a couple of years, I wouldn't have to-it's a great feeling, to know I'm doing it because I want to do it

It's my memory, and what happened between that moment 10 or 15 years ago and now, there's a lot of gray area

One thing that success has taught me is censorship

A man doesn't know what it's like to be a woman; it's that simple.

I've got to start using my brain more - I've got to be more ethereal and more enlightened.

They look at someone like me, and I just really get up their nose. I really wind them up.

I've been slagged off completely by the art world

I've got over so much. Mum wouldn't want anything to come into my life that would make me fragile again

I'm out of here, I'm better than all of you.

I want to spend my life with someone and do nice things and go on adventures, read books and have nice food and celebrate things. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in the bedroom like some people who just go to bed and never get out again.

I thought it would be my one and only exhibition, so I decided to call it My Major Retrospective

I have hardly any friends who aren't gay

I've been making bronze sculptures for a long time. My sculptures are wholly unsuccessful and uncommercial. No one is even the remotest bit interested in them. So it's almost like my hobby.

When you're 20 or 30, looking ahead, you see these benchmarks for relationships, career, ambition, sexuality, and they went off into infinity. When you get to 50, you look at what's ahead of you, and there's an end. It goes into a nothingness, a void.

I don't ask for an apology because it's only tomorrow's fish-and-chip paper.

People try constantly to use me, and I hate it.

When you don't have children you have to define and make your own purpose, and make your own reason for being here.

Women, at 50, are on a plateau with their careers, but later they ascend.

There's so much stuff said about me that's not true, so now if something is hurtful and wrong, I send an e-mail or letter immediately, saying, This is not true.

It wasn't so much destroying my dancing, it was destroying me

I didn't have an exhibition anywhere until I was 30. My first exhibition was at 30, and then for my first show in America, I'm 50. It's kind of all right: I'm just a slow burner.

It's happened time and time again, but the committee has always decided against it-the work was too conservative or didn't fit within the budget; there are millions of different reasons.

One thing about an artist, it doesn't matter how much your work sells for in your life, it's going to sell for ten times more than that after you're dead, and that's what you have to protect.

The idea that I'm going to have to sit down to write some fiction where I'm going to have to think of a plot would really scare me, because it would come out a mess.

With any story I write, I could actually write it from three or four different perspectives, which would end with a completely different moral at the end.

It pleases me that people can be interactive

There is nothing difficult about my work, and people get to hear it from me.

I'd like to think I inspire young people to be creative.

My mum has never wanted me to have children. She thinks I would be destroying my life, even now.

My work rarely comes up in secondary market, so it means that my prices stay low.

In New York, working at the foundry, I was making these little figures. I desperately would like to make big figures, but I just can't do it; my hands don't do it. We were talking about making bronze plinths, and then we made one, a square one. I wrote on it, then I put a little figure on top, and it just looked really good. It worked.

We have a really good life, we like it the way it is. If I keep fit and healthy and in shape, I do actually have a few good years.

I should be careful what I say here, but I don't think I'm visually the best artist in the world. I've got to be honest about this.

Some people use just one condom, right? But we use tons.

The land's really beautiful, it's just that it's a bit of a macho society to say the least and it's very difficult to get things done.

The wheel that squeaks gets the oil.

Sometimes i feel lonely, but it's ok

The soul will always do what it needs to do,

Theres different kinds of love, and Id never experienced that kind of totally platonic love. All the love Ive experienced has always been a kind of deal, and now, as I get older, I realise that theres this other love out there.

Strolling on the plateau of life, desperate for the mountain, I never thought that I would get this far. It's only art that has carried me through, given me faith in my own existence. But now I am approaching a point in my life where I desire more...

All the people in the late '80s and early '90s were really hell-bent on doing something for themselves, and they wouldn't take no for an answer. There was a lot of determination, and I was definitely part of that way of thinking.

I'm a terrible cook, but if I could cook, I would see that in art as well, it's how much creative energy you put into something.

I feel physically ill if I don't make work, I don't create. I don't feel very good. I don't feel right, I feel wrong.

The people in Miami are so different from anywhere else I've been in America. They're so down to earth, really friendly, and quite self-effacing, with a good sense of humor. I'm not saying other parts of America don't have a sense of humor, but Miami maybe has to have a really good sense of humor for lots of different reasons, and it works. It works for me.

I had to come to terms with my failure as an artist... I had to find a way for myself.

I'm totally monogamous when I'm in a relationship, and when I'm not in a relationship, I don't sleep around. So when I'm not with someone, I'm really on my own.

I've never been married because, first of all, I don't think I've ever seriously been asked by anyone who I wanted to marry. And also I'm monogamous.

When I am ill or upset he jumps up on to the bed to curl up close beside me. But if I am in bed with a hangover he will have nothing to do with me.

If I were really, truly in love with someone who was truly in love with me, then I would get married, but that would be the only reason I'd get married.

My New Year's Eve is always 2 July, the night before my birthday. That's the night I make my resolutions. And this year scares the life out of me, because no matter how successful, how good things appear, there is always a deep core of failure within me, although I am trying to deal with it. My biggest fear, this coming year, is that I will be waking up alone. It makes me wonder how many bodies will be fished out of the Thames, how many decaying corpses will be found in one-room flats. I'm just being realistic.

For me, being an artist with a high profile is a good thing for art.

I found that life has to be edited to continue.

People don't remember. Revenge is sweet.

There is no comparison between him and me; he developed a whole new way of making art and he's clearly in a league of his own. It would be like making comparisons with Warhol.

They grew really quickly. One minute I didn't have any tits and the next I had the biggest tits in the world

Being an artist and having to be responsible for the art that you make is really quite challenging, and as you get older it becomes more and more difficult.

When I think about sex it makes me realise how alone I feel.

I had become conscious of my physicality, aware of my presence and open to the ugly truths of the world. At the age of thirteen, I realised that there was a danger in innocence and beauty, and I could not live with both.

I'm not opposed to commerce, even though I'm an artist.

The words went round and round and round in my mind and my body, until I knew they were no longer my words but something that had been carved into my heart. And now my soul was crying.

What's really good about the word 'art' is that 'art' is a word like 'love,' or 'god,' or whatever. It transcends so many things...

My influences were from Europe from between 1900 and 1945. My favorite artists were Egon Schiele or Edvard Munch. I wasn't interested in contemporary art at all.

Have you ever longed for someone so much, so deeply that you thought you would die? That your heart would just stop beating? I am longing now, but for whom I don't know. My whole body craves to be held. I am desperate to love and be loved. I want my mind to float into another's. I want to be set free from despair by the love I feel for another. I want to be physically part of someone else. I want to be joined. I want to be open and free to explore every part of them, as though I were exploring myself.

I've worked really hard. I've made three pieces of seminal art in my life. If I died tomorrow, I'd be remembered for making them. There are a lot of artists who, no matter how hard they work in their lives, will never make anything seminal.

Most people don't do something seminal. I've done it twice: with my tent and my bed. Picasso did it with Cubism.

When it comes to words I have a uniqueness that I find almost impossible in art – and it's my words that actually make my art quite unique.

There should be something revelatory about art. It should be totally creative and open doors for new thoughts and experiences.

Art is like a lover whom you run away from but who comes back and picks you up.