John Cusack – 32 Quotes

32 Quotes by John Cusack

I have a bit of a rebellious nature.

– John Cusack

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

– John Cusack

But no, I don’t really like romantic comedies, so I don’t really care. I never go see ’em.

– John Cusack

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

– John Cusack

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

– John Cusack

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

– John Cusack

I don’t want to produce anymore small or independent movies because it’s just too hard these days.

– 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

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 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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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