Quotes from Cate Blanchett

It's not the normal way to look at things but I experienced death at a really young age and because of that it's been part of my mental landscape that death is really very possible.

I saw the first 'How to Train Your Dragon' film with my children, and I found it utterly exhilarating.

I remember thinking, when I was playing Hedda Gabler, that several sequences of the play were utterly absurd.

The Oscar is very beautiful, utterly mesmeric, but I don't feel any more important because I have won one. It doesn't mean I'm any better than anyone.

My husband went through a phase of giving me vacuum cleaners, sewing machines and Mixmasters. It's ironic. He is encouraging me to develop a hobby, I think.

We've enshrined the purity, sanctity, value, and importance of bringing children into the world, yet we don't discuss death. There used to be an enshrined period where mourning was a necessary part of going through the process of grieving; death wasn't considered morbid or antisocial. But that's totally gone.

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

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.

Don't you find that work, if you love it, is actually really invigorating?

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.

I think most beauty tips that work and last are kind of old.

As an actor I suppose you're constantly observing. I don't sit in restaurants making notes, I don't live my life in order to then feed it into my work.

I look at someone's face and I see the work before I see the person. I personally don't think people look better when they do it; they just look different.

I would really have liked to have gone to Broadway with 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' I was proud of that.

I tend to have this perverse reaction to authority and stress: I become more confident and clear when a challenge is enormous.

When you're stretching yourself, as a role like 'Blue Jasmine' did for me, you risk falling flat on your face.

No one wants to see me struggling to get a horse under control because I can't ride it. And no one wants to see me not knowing how to deal with the psychological makeup of the character.

Particularly at the moment, it's an incredibly optimistic thing to bring children into the world.

You do not want to be in a creative organisation with everybody being like-minded and stroking each other's creative egos. You want differences of opinion... constructively.

We're constantly morphing into different outward manifestations of ourselves. That's what I find curious about people.

Culture civilizes us, and that's why every single despotic regime has tried to smash [the arts].

I admire the work of brilliant actresses such as Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren, who have had such varied careers. They have never stopped working, and they are as great today as they ever were.

Because the picture is called 'Veronica Guerin,' you expect a biopic. But it's really about the last two years of her life.

There are certain people who prize celebrity over substance. That makes the media world go round. The media needs those people to exist.