Tracey Emin Quotes

I'm not saying I'm the best. There are many painters in the world. But there is only one Picasso.

From the way I sing to what I write about to what I put out with my stamp separates me from everyone else.

The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.

The emphasis on original, individual work in the past years has done a great deal to produce a crop of eccentric fakes and has carried art away from the stream of tradition. Tradition is our heritage of knowledge and experience. We can't get along without it.

Beethoven and Michelangelo, who sold their artworks for profit, were entrepreneurs and capitalists.

I believe myself to be a worthwhile and inventive performer in my own right. But I'm not in a league with Lenny [Bruce], certainly not in terms of social commentary.

My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging it on the wall.

Genius is personal, decided by fate, but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.

No more than a famous master can be replaced and another take over the completion of the half-finished painting he has left behind can the great poet and thinker, the great statesman and the great soldier, be replaced. For their activity lies always in the province of art. It is not mechanically trained but inborn by God's grace.

The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual;" and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise.

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

Persons of genius, and those who are most capable of art, are always most fond of nature: as such are chiefly sensible, that all art consists in the imitation and study of nature.

O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives.

If you study a great work of art, you'll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me.

We, by our arts may be called the grandsons of God.

There must be understanding between the artist and the people. In the best ages of art that has always been the case. Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways. But the good artists who follow after genius — and I count myself among these — have to restore the lost connection once more.

Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor.

No theoretician, no writer on art, however interesting he or she might be, could be as interesting as Picasso. A good writer on art may give you an insight to Picasso, but, after all, Picasso was there first.

The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

I just want to paint and say what I'm going to say.

There is sometimes a greater judgement shewn in deviating from the rules of art, than in adhering to them; and?there ismore beauty inthe works of a great genius who is ignorant of all the rules of art, than in the works of a little genius, who not only knows but scrupulously observes them.

In the vaunted works of Art, The master-stroke is Nature's part.

It's important to be yourself. What art does for everyone, helps you understand yourself and in a distilled way, whether it's a painting or a scene in acting or a joke. It distills something about everyday life that can be important to you.

Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives

You say I sucked at the Oscars. I was a genius at the Oscars. That was experimental tuxedo sleep art.