Emin Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

Sometimes i feel lonely, but it's ok — Tracey Emin

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

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

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

People don't remember. Revenge is sweet. — Tracey Emin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Tracey Emin

I found that life has to be edited to continue. — Tracey Emin

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

It pleases me that people can be interactive. — Tracey Emin

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. — Tracey Emin

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

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

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

I have hardly any friends who aren't gay. — Tracey Emin

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. — Tracey Emin

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

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

I don't believe in love, but I believe in you. — Tracey Emin

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

I never grew up. — Tracey Emin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In his late quartets, Beethoven introduces an element that shouldn't be there, that should be left for meditation, though I love them. I can see that through them came Wagner and Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg. And then came Tracey Emin. And I can see it all as one downward path. — John Tavener

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

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

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

Before 1999, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas offered to get me exhibitions, but joining the Stuckists put a kaibosh on all that - because I wasn't prepared to be controlled. I agreed to co-found the Stuckists to be allowed to say what I wanted, and I left the Stuckists because I didn't really want to be in them in the first place. — Billy Childish

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

DON'T BE AFRAID TO TAKE THE PAST HEAD ON. — Tracey Emin

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

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

Oh Christ, I just wanted you to fuck me. And then I became greedy, I wanted you to love me. — Tracey Emin

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

The wheel that squeaks gets the oil. — Tracey Emin

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strange living. I have always had a strange life. Never knowing what was true, living in a world of dreams. Christ, I told myself, I've got to get up. But with the weight of my thoughts, I felt like I couldn't breathe. Why did I keep taking on all of this - this shit and keep feeling it even after it had passed through a hundred million times? — Tracey Emin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Tracey Emin

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

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

One thing that success has taught me is censorship. — Tracey Emin

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

The soul will always do what it needs to do, — Tracey Emin

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm part of an industry that everybody wants to be a part of. I do hang out with a lot of sort of powerful, interesting people like Bella Freud or Jay Joplin or Tracey Emin. I'm part of that group of people. Brit artists who are doing things. That's what I do. Some of them happen to be aristocrats. — Duncan Roy

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

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

The bungalow was a hideous red-brick structure built, if I had to guess, in the early 1980s by some hack architect who'd been aiming at art deco and hit Tracy Emin instead. — Ben Aaronovitch

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