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

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

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

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

I never grew up.

- Tracey Emin

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

- Tracey Emin

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

- Tracey Emin

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

- 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

It pleases me that people can be interactive.

- 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

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

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

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

- 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

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

- Tracey Emin

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

- Tracey Emin

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

- 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'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