Cate Blanchett Quotations | Page 4

Onscreen, babies and animals are my inspiration. They're so alive and there and not messed up in the head the way I am.

To become a painter or a sculptor or a graphic designer is quite an isolated way to spend your life.

There is not a lot of separation between work and home life.

Perhaps being a parent has changed career more in that you ask yourself how long you'll be away from home. My eldest child is approaching school age so that becomes more important. They're less portable.

You learn an enormous lot through failure.

I think you need to have a healthy sense of doubt because I think doubt leads to inquiry.

If you think about Audrey Hepburn, I think she became more beautiful when she stopped being an actress and started working with humanitarian campaigns. The more engaged you can become the more you can shed your self-consciousness.

What I love about the theater is that you know who you're acting for: your audience. And the thing I find really hard in film is, you don't. The audience is invisible. And we're sitting there, hoping there's other people out there.

We talked about trying to create an image that would somehow, to an audience, create the sense of awe, wonder and shock that the troops must have felt that their monarch - and a female monarch - went to the frontline of battle and was prepared to lay down her life. This speech is so well known and has been done in virtually every version of the events of Elizabeth's life.

I couldn't possibly have played someone with feelings towards a woman unless I had those feelings myself.

Someone might have a germ of talent, but 90 percent of it is discipline and how you practice it, what you do with it. ... Instinct won't carry you through the entire journey. It's what you do in the moments between inspiration.

I think referendums are fantastic as long as the question is phrased in a way which is not meant to deliberately confuse or confound people.

I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth.

I love strange choices. I'm always interested in people who depart from what is expected of them and go into new territory.

You do get scrutinized in the digital age. You know they're zooming in on every pore, which you've got to forget about.

I don't think about being beautiful or not being beautiful. It's more about feeling confident inside your own skin really and thinking about yourself as little as possible.

And perhaps, those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the center are niche experience, they are not. Audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.

I can be a real pessimist. You know that when you win an Oscar, and you walk offstage, and your first thought is: 'Oh God, I've peaked.'

I don't like to reduce a role to fit me. The challenge to me is to expand to it. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. But that's the challenge of it.

I don't mind not looking conventionally - you know, attractive if that's what the part requires.

The great thing about not being American is that you don't assume you know what a Southern accent sounds like, so you have to be specific.

and for casting me. He cast me on instinct, not with any concern to box office, so I thank him eternally.