Top 75 Tracey Emin Quotes
#1. People don't remember. Revenge is sweet.
Tracey Emin
#2. 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.
Tracey Emin
#3. I don't ask for an apology because it's only tomorrow's fish-and-chip paper.
Tracey Emin
#4. It wasn't so much destroying my dancing, it was destroying me.
Tracey Emin
#5. When I was 14-15
There was nothing to my life
but dancing and sex
I'd go to night clubs and dance
Then I'd meet someone and have sex
it was Fine and easy
nothing to do
BUT Think with my body
like a bird
I Thought I was Free
TrAcey Emin
Tracey Emin
#6. Oh Christ, I just wanted you to fuck me. And then I became greedy, I wanted you to love me.
Tracey Emin
#7. DON'T BE AFRAID TO TAKE THE PAST HEAD ON.
Tracey Emin
#8. 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.
Tracey Emin
#9. I remember, when I was about ten years old, working out that I would be thirty-six in the year 2000. It seemed so far away, so old, so unreal. And here I am, a fucked, crazy, anorexic-alcoholic-childless beautiful woman. I never dreamed it would be like this.
Tracey Emin
#10. 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 ...
Tracey Emin
#11. 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.
Tracey Emin
#12. 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.
Tracey Emin
#13. I've got to start using my brain more - I've got to be more ethereal and more enlightened.
Tracey Emin
#14. One thing that success has taught me is censorship.
Tracey Emin
#15. There is nothing difficult about my work, and people get to hear it from me.
Tracey Emin
#16. 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.
Tracey Emin
#17. It's my memory, and what happened between that moment 10 or 15 years ago and now, there's a lot of gray area.
Tracey Emin
#19. I had to come to terms with my failure as an artist ... I had to find a way for myself.
Tracey Emin
#20. Art is like a lover whom you run away from but who comes back and picks you up.
Tracey Emin
#21. 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.
Tracey Emin
#22. 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.
Tracey Emin
#23. They look at someone like me, and I just really get up their nose. I really wind them up.
Tracey Emin
#24. Most people don't do something seminal. I've done it twice: with my tent and my bed. Picasso did it with Cubism.
Tracey Emin
#25. 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.
Tracey Emin
#26. I've been slagged off completely by the art world.
Tracey Emin
#27. I'd like to think I inspire young people to be creative.
Tracey Emin
#28. Maybe I don't believe things myself, as well. Truth is such a transient thing.
Tracey Emin
#29. There should be something revelatory about art.
It should be totally creative and open doors
for new thoughts and experiences.
Tracey Emin
#30. 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.
Tracey Emin
#31. 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.
Tracey Emin
#32. 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.
Tracey Emin
#33. My work rarely comes up in secondary market, so it means that my prices stay low.
Tracey Emin
#34. Sometimes I have the most amazing moments of clarity. Razor sharp, crystal clear. It's at these times I can see how fucking stupid I am.
Tracey Emin
#35. They grew really quickly. One minute I didn't have any tits and the next I had the biggest tits in the world
Tracey Emin
#36. For me, being an artist with a high profile is a good thing for art.
Tracey Emin
#37. I found that life has to be edited to continue.
Tracey Emin
#38. I am fiercely independent and I probably wouldn't be if it wasn't for the way in which I was brought up.
Tracey Emin
#39. I don't believe in love, but I believe in you.
Tracey Emin
#40. 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!'
Tracey Emin
#42. When I think about sex it makes me realise how alone I feel.
Tracey Emin
#43. 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.
Tracey Emin
#44. 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.
Tracey Emin
#46. I have hardly any friends who aren't gay.
Tracey Emin
#47. 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.
Tracey Emin
#48. It pleases me that people can be interactive.
Tracey Emin
#49. A man doesn't know what it's like to be a woman; it's that simple.
Tracey Emin
#50. I woke up feeling alone, so lonely. The night before, I had cried myself to sleep. I lay there on the floor, listening to the tube trains passing beneath me. I thought, All those hundreds and thousands and millions of people. London, London - I hate you. I picked myself up and got ready.
Tracey Emin
#51. 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.
Tracey Emin
#52. The soul will always do what it needs to do,
Tracey Emin
#53. I thought it would be my one and only exhibition, so I decided to call it My Major Retrospective.
Tracey Emin
#54. 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.
Tracey Emin
#55. I've got over so much. Mum wouldn't want anything to come into my life that would make me fragile again.
Tracey Emin
#56. 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.
Tracey Emin
#57. My mum has never wanted me to have children. She thinks I would be destroying my life, even now.
Tracey Emin
#58. When you don't have children you have to define and make your own purpose, and make your own reason for being here.
Tracey Emin
#59. A made desire to be more human, to be more normal, that's what pushes me, these days - but as someone said the other say. 'Trace, you're going to have to face facts. You and normal parted a lomg, long time ago.
Tracey Emin
#60. 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.
Tracey Emin
#61. 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.
Tracey Emin
#62. Women, at 50, are on a plateau with their careers, but later they ascend.
Tracey Emin
#63. I'm out of here, I'm better than all of you.
Tracey Emin
#64. 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 ...
Tracey Emin
#65. I really love animals. My cat is my little soul mate. He's not just a cat, he's my friend.
Tracey Emin
#66. 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.
Tracey Emin
#67. 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.
Tracey Emin
#68. I'm not opposed to commerce, even though I'm an artist.
Tracey Emin
#69. 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.
Tracey Emin
#70. People try constantly to use me, and I hate it.
Tracey Emin
#71. 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.
Tracey Emin
#72. 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.
Tracey Emin
#73. 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.
Tracey Emin
#74. 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.
Tracey Emin
#75. 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.
Tracey Emin
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