Sourced

• I want to be with my friends. I'm drunk. I want to phone my mum. She's going to be embarrassed by this conversation. I don't care. I don't give a fuck about it.
  • Clare Longrigg, "Sixty Minutes, Noise: by art's bad girl", The Guardian, (1997-12-04)
  • Said by Emin, apparently drunk, during a live Channel 4 programme. The remark made national news and catapulted her to overnight fame.

• Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!
  • Milner, Frank (ed), The Stuckists Punk Victorian, [National Museums Liverpool 2004], p. 134
  • Said to ex-boyfriend, Billy Childish, as quoted in the Stuckists manifesto (1999), giving Charles Thomson the idea for the name Stuckism.

• When it comes to words I have a uniqueness that I find almost impossible in art – and it's my words that actually make my art quite unique.
  • "Artist Emin leaves us baffled" BBC, (2001-12-06)
  • Emin was given the Plain English Campaign's "Foot in Mouth" award for this remark, made in a newspaper interview.

• There is no comparison between him and me; he developed a whole new way of making art and he's clearly in a league of his own. It would be like making comparisons with Warhol.
  • The Independent on Sunday 2005-03-12. Accessed 2006-03-19.
  • On artist Damien Hirst.

• When I think about sex it makes me realise how alone I feel.
  • "Emin reveals naked self portraits" BBC, (2005-05-27)

Unsourced

• If you’ve made seminal work, you never know when the next one is coming or where it’s coming from. Most artists never make a seminal piece of art in their lives, and if you’ve made two, which I have, then I’ve done all right.

• I often think that I don’t really know anything, and then, when I think about my work, and my sewing, and about my blankets, I know what I’m doing: I can cut out a sentence in felt in five minutes; it would take most people that amount of time just to cut out one letter.

• I couldn't have sex with someone who didn't think was a good artist.