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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

In the future, there is no future.

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

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

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

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

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

A lot of people know that something very drastic has happened to the very idea of America.

The elderly have so much to offer. They're our link with history.

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.

I was never interested in being an overly public person.

If you wanna give me an award, I'll take it. Just don't make me go to the party afterwards.

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.

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.

I never wanted to come off as self-important.

Justice always has context.

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

I don't agonize over decisions as much these days. The criteria of what's important to me is clear.

Satire is meant to have teeth; satire is meant to be dangerous. But it also happens to be fun because subversion and telling the right kind of people to go to hell is supposed to feel good.