Quotes from Cate Blanchett

I don't know, maybe my sons will be gay.

I never feel particularly comfortable holding a gun, but when you're playing somebody who lived in the frontier southwest, guns are a part of their life. Anyone who lives on land has a gun.

What I think of as a mistake might be something that does really well at the box office, so I'm my own harshest critic - as we all are, really.

I'm so misunderstood!

Look, I live in the modern world as much as anyone else.

When you go to a concert, part of being there is that you're all hearing the same thing. It's about being in a crowd. If you go to a gig and there are two people there, then it's not the same thing.

I think my understanding of different types of love has certainly deepened.

I have the embarrassing thing where often if you're watching a film, you kind of go through the emotions and the thought stages that your character went through, but you sort of do it with Tourette's. So I end up often crying when I'm crying, and looking angry when I'm looking angry, so it's pretty ugly.

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.

I think that the benefit of playing someone like Queen Elizabeth is that so much has been written about her, and there's so much speculation about her - was she a hermaphrodite? She's so mythologised, and there are a lot of images of her.

There's many things that you can do with your life. It doesn't necessarily - I think if you're in a creative sphere, or if you're hungry for experience, then those experiences don't necessarily happen like rungs of a ladder or in a linear way.

People who say, 'There's nothing to fear from spiders' have clearly never been to Australia.

Marriage is a risk; I think it's a great and glorious risk, as long as you embark on the adventure in the same spirit.

Like any mum, I fear some mysterious illness befalling my children.

I guess I prefer to be quite private. It's a myth that actors are exhibitionists.

I just don't see myself as the heroine in my own narrative.

It's important to travel and move and have a continual set of experiences so you've got more to feed back into your work. For me, it's a natural thing.

Well, I've never looked upon myself as being a beauty, per se.

I don't understand a way to work other than bold-facedly running towards failure.

Actresses can get outrageously precious about the way they look. That's not what life's about. If you starve yourself to the point where your brain cells shrivel, you will never do good work. And if you're overly conscious of your arms flapping in the wind, how can you look the other actor in the eye to respond to them?

I discovered early on that some performers live their life in order to act, so all their relationships are simply an experience that they can feed back into their work. Which I find vampiric.

Planning cities is a necessary but risky business.

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

If I had my way, if I was lucky enough, if I could be on the brink my entire life - that great sense of expectation and excitement without the disappointment - that would be the perfect state.