Cate Blanchett Quotes

As professional actors, it's our job to entertain our audiences while setting benchmarks for ourselves as well, creatively and intellectually.

I'm sick of all these knights in shining armor parts, I want to do something worthwhile like plays and films that have something to say.

I see my career as not just music, but as hopefully an entertainer on all mediums, and someone who can have real influence and make great art.

I think you have a limited amount of impact as an entertainer, performer, or musician.

I'm in show business, and I'm an entertainer, but I also see myself as an artist doing social and spiritual work.

In the entertainment industry all that anybody wants to do whether it's music or stories or dancing or comedy or whatever, they want to entertain the public. And they do it any way they can. Sometimes they concentrate simply on entertaining people and they don't care what message they are giving.

Today's work, I don't know it just doesn't make sense, a lot of it. It's just guns and sex and more guns and more sex. You say to yourself, when the hell are you gonna get down to the nitty-gritty and do something good so people can be entertained? I mean if they call this entertainment.

If people really stopped and realized how much art and creative people move the world versus politics and religion, I mean it’s not even up for debate. An artist at least creates things, puts things into the world. Where as these other people are destroying things, taking things out of the world.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

I am proud to have been in a business that gives pleasure, creates beauty, and awakens our conscience, arouses compassion, and perhaps most importantly, gives millions a respite from our so violent world.

I'm very aware of how much movies, literature and art affect culture. They are a reflection of the world around us and they are also a means by which we engage with the world around us.

In fine arts, when you make a painting, it's just a painting. But if you make a painting in the entertainment industry, it can be an album cover or a t-shirt or a logo. I like that entertainment has this usefulness - that it's ultimately trying to make a bunch of people feel something, and to think about life and be able to use things that were so simple and direct but potentially have a really powerful effect.

Yes, we were amazed when that happened. It was a real joke to us. Konrad Lueg and I did a Happening, and we used the phrase just for the Happening, to have a catchy name for it; and then it immediately got taken up and brought into use. There's no defence against that - and really it's no bad thing.

As a guy comedian, your special is probably the closest thing to the excitement of a wedding day. It's your first one, and you want it to be perfect, and you want it to mean something. You want it to look good.

Jazz, I mean, music will always move, because it can't become stagnant. Because if it becomes stagnant, it's like a river, it'll kill us all. It has to keep moving, music will always flow.

I think that he [Michael Jackson] did derive an ultimate sense of joy and satisfaction in what others enjoyed from him that was denied to himself. There's no question that the transcendent art that he created was a means, an instrument, a vehicle for others to experience what he didn't.

Burmese authors and artists can play the role that artists everywhere play. They help to mold the outlook of a society - not the whole outlook and they are not the only ones to mold the outlook of society, but they have an important role to play there. And I think if they take up this role seriously and link it to the kind of changes were wish to bring about in our country they could be a tremendous help.

In the right situation, acting on television can be extraordinarily satisfying creatively. But that's incredibly rare. Otherwise, it can be like working in a really remunerative coal mine. That's the down side.

Because of their origin and purpose, the meanings of art are of a different order from the operational meanings of science and technics: they relate, not to external means and consequences, but to internal transformations, and unless it produce these internal transformations the work of art is either perfunctory or dead.

I would never go back to doing the show again. I mean, every day I think about Lifestyles because somebody comes up to me and tells me how much they love the show and I should bring it back, but this is not the time to bring it back. I don't think it would be as successful today as it once was.

I think commercial success is really important. It means there are more people listening, and you're affecting the zeitgeist more. If only a hundred people know you exist, it's harder to get your message across.

Musicians have the power to influence people and along with movie makers, they can reach and influence more people than any group of people, more than scientists and certainly more than politicians.

Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art -- although it may possibly be very good journalism?

In the end, we're just showmen. But, I think that it's an important factor. Not to be anything else but clear about that - for me, creativity is an important part of our evolution. Art has probably done more good for the world than war. But they're equally powerful. They both create revolutions.

You have to create different things, either through lighting or changing the format of the songs and how you're going to sing them, and even sometimes props.