Tracey Emin Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

I've been slagged off completely by the art world and I don't know whether fancy being slagged off by the literary world as well. It's just too much.

People don't remember. Revenge is sweet.

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.

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

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 found that life has to be edited to continue.

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.

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.

Criticism on my works is like this: you've worked hard all of your life, you went to Oxford, and you've done this and that, and you're an art critic. Your job is to unravel the "secret" or whatever, and you come across an entity like me. It's going to piss you off. Because there's no great secret, what you see is what you get, and anyone can understand what I'm doing. So, it's almost like I make this critic-person redundant, just by my attitude, and they resent me for that.

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.

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's in yesterday's newspaper is today's fish-and-chip paper. If it really affects my life so badly, so personally, then I would do something about it. When it's really out of order, or something possibly detrimental to my family, or I'm driven to such a level that I know that this can be picked up and repeated again, I will just write or e-mail the newspaper editor. So, in the next day's newspaper, it might say, "Tracey Emin says this is factually incorrect."

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

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.

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

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

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

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

One thing that success has taught me is censorship.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

People try constantly to use me and I hate it.

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.

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

It pleases me that people can be interactive

I have hardly any friends who aren't gay

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.

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.

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