Quotes from 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.

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.

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

It pleases me that people can be interactive.

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.

People don't remember. Revenge is sweet.

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

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

When you don't have children you have to define and make your own purpose, and make your own reason for being here.

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

One thing that success has taught me is censorship.

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 found that life has to be edited to continue.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I have hardly any friends who aren't gay.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.