Top 66 John Cusack Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have a good friend who’s a Texas girl; Texas girls are a whole different breed.

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.

The British keep employing me, and that makes me like them. It also makes me think they’re very intelligent.

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

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.

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.

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 try not to dwell on the past. I’m not a big go-back-and-try-to-relive-your-past kinda person.

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

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.

I read Noam Chomsky. I like some of Gore Vidal’s stuff.

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.

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

Well, any time you do anything good, it’s man versus himself, right? That’s the art, the challenge.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I guess maybe I’m idealistic.

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.

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

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.

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.

I am rich enough.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Nope, no sex scandals yet. But I am open to offers!

I just love the process of working with other actors.

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.

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.

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

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.

Having people remember something that you did 25 years ago doesn’t suck.

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.