Tracey Emin

“People don't remember. Revenge is sweet.”

“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.”

“It's my memory, and what happened between that moment 10 or 15 years ago and now, there's a lot of gray area.”

“I have hardly any friends who aren't gay.”

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

“It pleases me that people can be interactive.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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...”

“I am fiercely independent and I probably wouldn't be if it wasn't for the way in which I was brought up.”