Top 96 Quotes & Sayings by Tracey Emin

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

It pleases me that people can be interactive.

I never grew up.

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

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.

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

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

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

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'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.

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

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.

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.

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

People don't remember. Revenge is sweet.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

One thing that success has taught me is censorship.

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

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 have hardly any friends who aren't gay.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

I've been slagged off completely by the art world.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The soul will always do what it needs to do.

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.

There are things going on in galleries recently that have shocked me. What I'm going to say is really controversial, but what I find the most provocative is the commerciality of art in general. And the fact that a lot of people have forgotten what the meaning of art is and what the intention behind it is.

The reason why I'm popular as an artist in this country is because it suits the psyche of the nation at this time. Ten years ago, my work wouldn't have had any currency, any popularity at all. Before in this country, you had to be accepted. You had to be part of the group. Now it's probably more trendy to have a problem.

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.

I found that life has to be edited to continue.

I like poor materials. I couldn't see myself making a bronze sculpture - it's not me. I like neon, because it's moving constantly and like drawing. The chemicals going through the neon turns me on really - it's sexy. I like fabrics, but one of the main things with objects is that I really have to love them before I can use them. I have to have the object around me a long time. The little chairs I used in my last White Cube show are ones that my dad bought for me. A sort of a psychometry with objects and things. It's like the pieces I've made are my things.

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.

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.

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

When I have an exhibition, I usually arrange it so that if people want to, they can spend two hours there. That way, people who like it don't feel cheated when they go. I want them to walk into the exhibition space and look low and at other levels and angles. The same with emotions. I want them to be emotionally manipulated, to come out feeling something. I want them to laugh, smile, feel sad. Even if they feel angry, that's okay.

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.