Tracey Emin Quotes

Art has to change things, and if it was immediately acceptable it would not be doing the job.

Let's get with it, guys: You don't need to hear a Ministry song to get political. You should be political on your own. We're just a side project to society. So do I care what people think about me personally? No. I just do what I do.

When the punk thing came along and I heard my friends saying, I hate these people with the pins in their ears. I said, Thank God, something got their attention.

Artists... disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church.

All art is based on non-conformity.

I get slightly irritated by people who say they're natural rebels because it just means that they're going to be against whatever anybody does, which is almost like saying you might as well leave it as it is. I'm naturally quite conformist, really. If I go to a country and they say, "You've got to drive on the right," I'm not going to drive on the left to show that I'm different. I'm able to stick to the law. I'm not a soldier for anything, either. I'm only a singer and I don't think it makes a difference what we sing.

I'm always thinking about young people first when I'm writing music. Whenever I can reach that young person and inspire them to go after their own dreams, start their own movement just like I did with Wondaland. Starting their own tribe and showing people that we are not all the same, we're not all monolithic. I think that's what it's all about for me.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

Naturally, grown-up citizens are concerned about the beatniks and delinquents. ... The question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same conclusions as the youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the structure of society that has becoming increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don't more people speak up and say so?

Try to keep the rebel artist alive in you, no matter how attractive or exhausting the temptation.

People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.

It is obvious to any observer that in every western country the increase of importance of public schools has been at least coincident with the relaxation of older family ties.

Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized "hero of our time" - and of all time.

I think there's always a call for people who are bucking the norm.

I am an artist who's just tryin' to do something different, and basically not caring about everybody's opinions and wanting to follow what everybody else is doing. At the same time, I know when to be serious, but I know when to joke.

I think the way the country has changed in part because of the presidency of Barack Obama, I think in part because of what we've - the violence that we have seen on our cell phones and our TV sets over the last couple of years. I think Black Lives Matter has helped to force these issues. Women like Sabrina Fulton. We're having a different conversation in this country right now about race and what it means to really understand your experience is and my experience is.

Tomorrow country then, tomorrow country now.

My analysis is that the gays are about 5% of the attack on marriage in this country, and the feminists are about 95%.

I think I've always felt as a band and as a musician and a music business person, I've always felt like an outsider, period.

I wanted to be a pariah, because all my heroes were cult artists, people who devoted their lives to poking into very narrow, very deep corners - Erik Satie, Alfred Jarry, Malcolm Lowry - people who suffered in order to express their vision of life.

Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.

A writer or painter cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive.

He who doesn't have the spirit of his time, has all its misery.

I think perhaps we manage our revolutions much more quietly in this country.