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.Collection: Truth
I really love animals. My cat is my little soul mate. He's not just a cat, he's my friend.Collection: Pet
One thing that success has taught me is censorship.Collection: Success
People don't remember. Revenge is sweet.
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 am fiercely independent and I probably wouldn't be if it wasn't for the way in which I was brought up.
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.
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.
My work rarely comes up in secondary market, so it means that my prices stay low.
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.
I don't ask for an apology because it's only tomorrow's fish-and-chip paper.
I'm out of here, I'm better than all of you.
I'd like to think I inspire young people to be creative.
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.
They look at someone like me, and I just really get up their nose. I really wind them up.
It's my memory, and what happened between that moment 10 or 15 years ago and now, there's a lot of gray area.
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 have hardly any friends who aren't gay.
I never grew up.
I thought it would be my one and only exhibition, so I decided to call it My Major Retrospective.
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.
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'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.
It pleases me that people can be interactive.
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.
My mum has never wanted me to have children. She thinks I would be destroying my life, even now.
People try constantly to use me, and I hate it.
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.
There is nothing difficult about my work, and people get to hear it from me.
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.
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.
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.
When you don't have children you have to define and make your own purpose, and make your own reason for being here.
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!'
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.
Women, at 50, are on a plateau with their careers, but later they ascend.
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.
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.
A man doesn't know what it's like to be a woman; it's that simple.
Art is like a lover whom you run away from but who comes back and picks you up.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Art
The soul will always do what it needs to do.Collection: Soul
Most people don't do something seminal. I've done it twice: with my tent and my bed. Picasso did it with Cubism.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Sexy