Tracey Emin Quotes
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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I've always said if I could own one piece it would be Vermeer's The Love Letter, and if I could put it anywhere it would be in a David Chipperfield building. I'm almost there with the building - Chipperfield is building a new house for me in London. The Vermeer is a long way off.
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For me, being an artist with a high profile is a good thing for art.
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There is nothing difficult about my work, and people get to hear it from me.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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One thing that success has taught me is censorship.
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I have hardly any friends who aren't gay
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My mum has never wanted me to have children. She thinks I would be destroying my life, even now.
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I found that life has to be edited to continue.
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I don't ask for an apology because it's only tomorrow's fish-and-chip paper.
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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.
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It pleases me that people can be interactive
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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.
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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."
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Maybe I don't believe things myself, as well. Truth is such a transient thing...
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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.
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I had to come to terms with my failure as an artist... I had to find a way for myself.
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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.
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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.
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Because of the amount of press attention, people went to see this dirty bed, as if it was a freak show. But when they got there, they saw something else - the bed, stuff on the walls, whatever. For the Tate, it's the highest attendance they ever received for the Turner Prize show. There was a massive queue, and when you got into my bit, you couldn't move.
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