Top 100 John Cusack Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Once you have opened up prisoner interrogation, wiretapping, border patrol, jailing and the services of the military, when this has been turned into a for-profit business in this endless war, then we're in deep trouble.
John Cusack
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. I never wanted to come off as self-important.
John Cusack
#11. 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
#12. All the choices we make in our life are pointless. There's no escaping the inevitable.
John Cusack
#14. The minute you realize that your options are unlimited, things just start falling into place all around you.
John Cusack
#15. I was never interested in being an overly public person.
John Cusack
#16. 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
#18. 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
#19. I was a teen star. That's disgusting enough.
John Cusack
#20. 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
#21. I read Noam Chomsky. I like some of Gore Vidal's stuff.
John Cusack
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Nope, no sex scandals yet. But I am open to offers!
John Cusack
#25. New York's like a boxing match. In Hollywood, it's like a Fellini movie or something.
John Cusack
#26. Having people remember something that you did 25 years ago doesn't suck.
John Cusack
#27. 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
#28. Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?
John Cusack
#29. The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is dizzyingly brilliant. Mark Leyner is a hyperkinetic shaman, who flies the banner of rum and candy and writes like a one-eyed feral bandit. His new book is supremely original, delirious and synapse-shattering.
John Cusack
#30. 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
#31. The British keep employing me, and that makes me like them. It also makes me think they're very intelligent.
John Cusack
#32. I'm not making any plans. I'm just going to let the universe surprise me.
John Cusack
#33. 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
#34. I think it's very improtant and healthy to tell differnt stories than the corporatist narratives we are being asked to swallow hook, line and sinker.
John Cusack
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. When you see a culture where the intellectual architects of the invasion are not shamed for their behavior but rewarded within the mainstream media culture, black comedy, satire, absurdism is the only response.
John Cusack
#40. 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
#41. I think poets tell better history than historians. Historians lie all the time but the poets can get to truth of it.
John Cusack
#42. A lot of people are not meant to be together.
John Cusack
#43. Usually I play people who just keep babbling on and on and on.
John Cusack
#44. I don't agonize over decisions as much these days. The criteria of what's important to me is clear.
John Cusack
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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.
John Cusack
#48. 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
#49. I feel like I'm a filmmaker; I don't feel I need to yell action and cut.
John Cusack
#50. 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
#51. The situation in the film is like me going out to Venice Beach and talking to a homeless guy on the boardwalk, and 13 years later he's the president.
John Cusack
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme.
John Cusack
#59. Being on a movie set is like one long financial crisis.
John Cusack
#60. It's supposed to feel good to throw a brick at the right people. There is a long tradition of naming and ridiculing and shaming and calling the villains what they are. Usually it was the artistocracy of the day and satire was the only way to speak truth to power.
John Cusack
#62. 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
#63. I like the George Romero films, which were really great, social satire movies; really twisted.
John Cusack
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Well, any time you do anything good, it's man versus himself, right? That's the art, the challenge.
John Cusack
#67. 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
#68. 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
#70. 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
#71. Every role you do is kind of a side of yourself. That's why they give you the part.
John Cusack
#72. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. It never hurts to be involved in any political or activist organization. I can never see how participation would be a bad thing. The key is being true to what you participate with and who.
John Cusack
#86. I think everything has some politics to it. It's just whether or not it admits to it. Politics is weird. I don't even know what that means any more.
John Cusack
#87. 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
#88. It's a very frightening time when something as basic as due process is seen as somehow radical.
John Cusack
#89. I have a good friend who's a Texas girl; Texas girls are a whole different breed.
John Cusack
#90. But no, I don't really like romantic comedies, so I don't really care. I never go see 'em.
John Cusack
#91. I don't want to produce anymore small or independent movies because it's just too hard these days.
John Cusack
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. All my romantic stories are a scrambled version of that first one.
John Cusack
#95. 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
#96. Usually I do everything reverse. I practice something in movies and then I try it in real life.
John Cusack
#97. I'm a paranoid schizophrenic. I am my own entourage!
John Cusack
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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