Creativity Quote by Tracey Emin

Emin’s sentence reads like a survival tactic dressed up as admin work: the artist as her own crisis-PR department, hitting “send” before the story hardens into fact. The blunt repetition of “not true” is doing double duty. It’s defensive, sure, but it’s also a claim to authorship. If your brand is built on confessional candor, being misquoted isn’t just annoying; it’s a kind of theft.

The context matters because Emin’s public persona has long been treated as fair game. Her work trades in autobiography and exposed nerve endings, which invites a familiar cultural move: people assume that if you offer intimacy, you’ve waived the right to control the narrative. She pushes back on that bargain. “Immediately” is the key word. It signals how reputations are made now: fast, sticky, and often lazily sourced. Waiting for a correction means losing the only window that counts.

There’s subtext in the choice of medium, too. E-mail and letters are unglamorous, almost bureaucratic, a sharp contrast to the myth of the artist as chaotic and above the paperwork. Emin is saying she won’t be romanticized into silence. The intent isn’t to polish herself into bland respectability; it’s to protect the precision of her mess. She’s insisting on a boundary: you can look, you can talk, but you don’t get to invent. In an attention economy that rewards the juiciest version of a woman’s life, “This is not true” becomes a small, stubborn act of control.