“I have a bit of a rebellious nature.”
― John Cusack
“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. I should have been contrite – and apologized for exposing her to the angry pimple.”
― John Cusack
“If you’re going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can’t be politically correct when you do that.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“But, you know, I’m sorry, I think democracy requires participation. I mean, I don’t want to proselytize but I do feel some sort of duty to participate in the process in some way other than just blindly getting behind a political party.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“I kept saying that I’d never live in L.A., and I didn’t think I would. But that’s where the work is, and I ended up making a lot of friends there, and my old friends moved out to Los Angeles too. And also, I think when you’re famous, its hard to live in a small town.”
― John Cusack
“Do I listen to pop music because I’m miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“Well, I think any actor can probably identify with being a professional liar. You don’t always look at yourself that way, but I know a lot of days I do.”
― John Cusack
“Poe had this curious kind of alchemical courage, where he took all the terrible things and terrors that happened in his life, all this shame and fear and pain, and turned them into great works of art. He was a complex, brilliant person who was just wired too tight.”
― John Cusack
“Probably Lloyd in ‘Say Anything’ is the closest to me – or to who I was at the time. It was just a great love story about people in the ’80s, and we all tried to make it feel as real as possible. It was such a wonderful time. We didn’t leave anything in the gym; we put it all out there.”
― John Cusack
“I read Noam Chomsky. I like some of Gore Vidal’s stuff.”
― John Cusack
“I think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“I was a teen star. That’s disgusting enough.”
― John Cusack
“A lot of people are not meant to be together.”
― John Cusack
“Any time you stop looking at evil as a black and white thing, it’s helpful. So the fact that there won’t be any obligatory Islamic terrorist stereotypes in movies any more, that’d be helpful.”
― John Cusack
“Art is spiritual.”
― John Cusack
“Being on a movie set is like one long financial crisis.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“I feel like I’m a filmmaker; I don’t feel I need to yell action and cut.”
― John Cusack
“I guess maybe I’m idealistic.”
― John Cusack
“I like the George Romero films, which were really great, social satire movies; really twisted.”
― John Cusack
“I love these movies where it’s just about the film. You don’t have my face on the poster. It’s all about the movie. I like that.”
― John Cusack
“I think when you get to the point where you don’t need to be in love, then you could be in love. You have to just be OK with yourself-and that’s a long process.”
― John Cusack
“I was never interested in being an overly public person.”
― John Cusack
“I was raised Catholic until I was old enough to say no.”
― John Cusack
“I was raised Irish Catholic, but I don’t consider myself Irish Catholic: I consider myself me, an American.”
― John Cusack
“I’ve seen the people who talk about their love lives in print invariably have doomed relationships with the person they’re talking about.”
― John Cusack
“Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme.”
― John Cusack
“People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.”
― John Cusack
“Sometimes you meet people and you feel like you’ve known them for a long time.”
― John Cusack
“The British keep employing me, and that makes me like them. It also makes me think they’re very intelligent.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“Usually I play people who just keep babbling on and on and on.”
― John Cusack
“New York’s like a boxing match. In Hollywood, it’s like a Fellini movie or something.”
― John Cusack
“I think 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. You don’t actually consummate it, but you get to pretend, imagine what it would be like.”
― John Cusack
“I think 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.”
― John Cusack
“It seems to me that one thing people do over and over again is try to figure out how to get married, stay married, fall in love, how to rekindle all this stuff. It seems to me to be a pretty eternal theme so I don’t know if you can get typecast from making movies about men relating to women. It seems to be what is going on on the planet a lot.”
― John Cusack
“Nope, no sex scandals yet. But I am open to offers!”
― John Cusack
“If people are constantly reading about you, and you’re overexposed, they’ve got no reason to go see your movies. Also, it’s not pleasant or nice to have your privacy invaded.”
― John Cusack
“Acting can be pretty challenging. I can’t say making a romantic comedy is challenging, but to do anything well, you have to put yourself into it.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“I just love the process of working with other actors.”
― John Cusack
“It’s a very frightening time when something as basic as due process is seen as somehow radical.”
― John Cusack
“I try not to dwell on the past. I’m not a big go-back-and-try-to-relive-your-past kinda person.”
― John Cusack
“I remember the ’80s being about the Cold War and Reagan and the homeless problem and AIDS. To me, it was kind of a dark, depressing time.”
― John Cusack
“I’m definitely nostalgic about the music of my youth; The Clash and Fishbone and that whole music scene. I still have all that music to this day. There was some great music going on in the late 70s and 80s.”
― John Cusack
“Well, any time you do anything good, it’s man versus himself, right? That’s the art, the challenge.”
― John Cusack
“Usually I do everything reverse. I practice something in movies and then I try it in real life.”
― John Cusack
“Hopefully as you get older you get more selfless. That would be probably a good goal. I don’t know if we do, though.”
― John Cusack
“I was never into the popular school or clique or anything. Then I started doing movies when I was in high school, so then I got popular. Then the girls paid attention to you who didn’t before.”
― John Cusack
“My point was that it’s hard to make good films, but I’m not under any illusion that you do all the time.”
― John Cusack
“I wanted to just be a filmmaker, and I thought I wanted to do all the aspects, and it seemed like as a producer was the best way to do it, because I could have… You never have control on a movie, but you have as much control as you can.”
― John Cusack
“But no, I don’t really like romantic comedies, so I don’t really care. I never go see ’em.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“No, actors go out with actresses as a form of self-flagellation.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“My job is to just express something that I want to express. And if I’m ahead or behind the curve, that’s for others to decide.”
― John Cusack
“My dad had a commercial film company, so he had a videotape player before anyone. So he got Mel Brooks movies or Citizen Kane or some classic old movies. And every summer the revival house in Evanston would show the great films from the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s.”
― John Cusack
“A lot of powerful people in Washington may think it’s a crazy-leftist-fringe position to think the intellectual authors of a torture regime should be investigated and prosecuted.”
― John Cusack
“Of course, I think it is legitimate for the Commander-in-Chief to be concerned for the safety of his soldiers.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“I think being self-referential is really narcissistic. Who’s to say anybody’s even thinking of you that much? But some of these movies that I’ve done, people still recite lines to me, even 20 years later.”
― John Cusack
“You can only really judge yourself in comparison to other people. How bad you are, but you’re not as bad as someone else. So it’s degrees of losing.”
― John Cusack
“I was only in one of the John Hughes films, and I never saw the other ones. I didn’t understand them. I kept hearing a really hip 40-year-old person talking in teenagers’ mouths.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“I never wanted to come off as self-important.”
― John Cusack
“Every role you do is kind of a side of yourself. That’s why they give you the part.”
― John Cusack
“Most movies, once the action starts there’s no more characters. You say a couple of dumb lines and then there’s just explosions until the end.”
― John Cusack
“I don’t want to produce anymore small or independent movies because it’s just too hard these days.”
― John Cusack
“The ages two to 15 I spent at different stages of shortness. I didn’t become a tall person until I was 16.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“I am rich enough.”
― John Cusack
“I don’t tend to think in terms of a moral authority – be a good boy, do good things – more in terms of what feels right.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“I feel close to Lloyd in ‘Say Anything’. He was like a super-interesting version of me. Only I’m not as good as him. Whatever part of me is romantic and optimistic, I reached into that to play Lloyd.”
― John Cusack
“The movies have got more corporate, they’re making fewer movies in general, and those they are making are all $200-$300m tent-pole releases that eat up all the oxygen.”
― John Cusack
“If you wanna give me an award, I’ll take it. Just don’t make me go to the party afterwards.”
― John Cusack
“I always liked it when people go back in time to discover things about themselves, like with ‘A Christmas Carol’ and you’re getting a tour of your life by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“Hollywood is just a bunch of people going around in Learjets to other people asking them if they’ve got any money? Well, they might have if they didn’t spend it all on jets.”
― John Cusack
“I was never a joiner. I tried – I had people I admired and liked and wanted to hang with, but I ended up starting a theatre company and that took me back to Chicago… I guess I wasn’t a scenester in the end. Something must have worked out right, as I’m still here – but I’m only a binge socialite.”
― John Cusack
“Roy, the guy I play in ‘The Grifters,’ is a guy who had a very bleak life. His mother had him at 13, and then when she was 17 or 18 and he was 4 or 5, they were trapped in a small Texas town somewhere, and she was ready to do anything to get out.”
― John Cusack
“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.”
― John Cusack
“Our parents more or less just kind of wanted us to pursue our passions. Whatever they would have been, they would have helped light the fire. They are very liberal, artistic people, but they didn’t force us into acting. They let us find our own ways.”
― John Cusack
“I don’t walk around talking about my life and spouting my philosophy to people I don’t know. I mean, if I get to know them, I’ll talk for hours. I guess I like a lower-key scene.”
― John Cusack
“You just try to get the best jobs that you can get. Sometimes I produce my own movies, so that’s your own sort of vision. That helps things. I don’t know what it is. Probably just circumstance. I’ve definitely been aware of the fact that I want to do different things.”
― John Cusack
“Having people remember something that you did 25 years ago doesn’t suck.”
― John Cusack
“I was working with a great actress – a superior artist in every way – and she really liked Celine Dion. I tried very hard, but I couldn’t understand it. I just can’t listen to Celine Dion! So I guess music is a deal breaker.”
― John Cusack
“I think that taking night trains or meeting someone on the road is pretty romantic. I’ve done a couple of things like that. I’ve surprised someone in Paris. And hopefully, when you surprise someone, they’re happy to see you.”
― John Cusack
“I have a good friend who’s a Texas girl; Texas girls are a whole different breed.”
― John Cusack
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