John Cusack Quotes

The more you expose yourself as a celebrity, the less interesting you are to watch in your work, because if you're putting yourself out there all the time, you're not holding anything back.

Being on a movie set is like one long financial crisis.

Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?

I remember once acting really cool on a bus with this girl named Stephanie. When I got home, I realized that I had a really big zit on my forehead. If you have acne problems, you really shouldn't be acting like Don Juan.

Hitler was so modern, in that he was obsessed with being famous. He was caught up with this rush to be have achieved greatness before turning 30.

Texas women have an amazing sense of purpose when they lose it. They're the best girls in the world - they're loyal and fun, but when they get mad, they'll try to kill you.

I've seen the people who talk about their love lives in print invariably have doomed relationships with the person they're talking about.

A lot of people are not meant to be together.

If you're looking at things with the right set of eyes, people are endlessly fascinating. And then, of course, if you look at it the wrong way, then the whole world is horrible and tedious and boring. That's the battle, really--to keep looking at the world in the right way.

It's like those high-school yearbook photos that everyone would rather not see: Oh my God, look at that mullet hair. I have those photos too, but for me, they're, like, entire movies. And they show them on cable.

I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.

I force people to have coffee with me, just because I don't trust that a friendship can be maintained without any other senses besides a computer or cellphone screen.

Maybe the absence of signs is a sign.

With acting, you wanna see if you can get into trouble without knowing how you're gonna get out of it. It's like the exact opposite of war, where you need an exit strategy. When you're acting, you should get all the way into trouble with no exit strategy, and have the cameras rolling.

There are some good people. But a good chunk of them will lie for no reason at all - it'll be ten o'clock and they'll tell you it's nine. You're looking at the clock and you can't even fathom why they're lying. They just lie because that's what they do.

Death is a billion-dollar business. They can't even pass a law where it takes seven days to get a gun. Why don't you have to go through the same kind of screening you do to get a driver's license? It's totally insane.

It's something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you're too awkward to do it.

I have a bit of a rebellious nature.

If I'm in something that I think is kinda good, it stays with me like a fever dream for a long time afterwards. I don't recall the finished product so much as the feeling of making it.

Good actors can sort of see into people and immediately you have a chemistry with them or not. It's like an affair with no mess.

There's also some element of coming of age during the Reagan administration, which everybody has painted as some glorious time in America, but I remember as being a very, very dark time. There was apocalypse in the air; the punk rock movement made sense.

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

Sometimes you meet people and you feel like you've known them for a long time.

If you're a movie star, there's a cycle you go through: adoration, adulation, you're used, and then you're discarded. And it happens again and again, always in that sequence.

I was raised Catholic until I was old enough to say no.

When applied to politics and taken to its extreme, kitsch is the mask of death. Fascism was all aesthetics. There was no core principle to it. There was no truth to it.

Get your sense of outrage back, and your sense of defiance and spirit back, and try to put these pieces together and confront the excesses of empire at every turn.

I was a teen star. That's disgusting enough.

I was raised Irish Catholic, but I don't consider myself Irish Catholic: I consider myself me, an American.

I grew up in Evanston and lived in Chicago for a long time, in Old Town and Wrigleyville. I did three films when I was in high school. The first was 'Class,' with Rob Lowe. I had a supporting role in that.

Of course, I think it is legitimate for the Commander-in-Chief to be concerned for the safety of his soldiers.

Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme.

I feel like I'm a filmmaker; I don't feel I need to yell 'action' and 'cut.'

The reason bin Laden staggered the planes going into the towers was so every camera would be focused on the second tower when the plane hit. It was not only the murder, but the perpetual image of the horror that permeated into people's consciousness.

Well, acting itself is a form of rebellion, always. Getting up there in front of people, telling stories - you're kind of going against the grain to begin with, wanting to do that, don't you think? Why else would you do it? Except maybe as kind of a way to affirm your very existence.

The film is not a success until it makes money. It's only good when there's a dollar figure attached to the box office.

All my romantic stories are a scrambled version of that first one.

Every role you do is kind of a side of yourself. That's why they give you the part.

New York's like a boxing match. In Hollywood, it's like a Fellini movie or something.

Radical Islam and US exceptionalism are in bed with each other. They're like lovers, methinks.

Getting trapped back in the '80s, it's almost like a comic nightmare, which for me is a very real nightmare. Every time I flip through the cable, I have flashbacks.

I never really saw myself as an activist but at some point the activist is the only moral position to take.

Usually I play people who just keep babbling on and on and on.

I like the George Romero films, which were really great, social satire movies; really twisted.

In the future, there is no future.

Did you know that the word person comes from the Latin word persona, which means mask? So maybe being human means we invite spectators to ponder what lies behind. Each of us will be composed of a variety of masks, and if we can see behind the mask, we would get a burst of clarity. And if that flame was bright enough, that's when we fall in love.

Usually I do everything reverse. I practice something in movies and then I try it in real life.

I just love the process of working with other actors. It's like jamming with a musician, except it takes a little more effort to get to that place as an actor, because you have the cameras and lights and everything. But I love jamming with these people.

Don't buy into the corporate mythology that's been rammed down our throats for all these years.

It's a very frightening time when something as basic as due process is seen as somehow radical.