Top 139 Quotes & Sayings by John Cusack

Art is spiritual.

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.

Hopefully as you get older you get more selfless. That would be probably a good goal. I don't know if we do, though.

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

I guess maybe I'm idealistic.

Sometimes you meet people and you feel like you've known them for a long time.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

I was never interested in being an overly public person.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

A lot of people are not meant to be together.

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.

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

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

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

I have a bit of a rebellious nature.

I've seen the people who talk about their love lives in print invariably have doomed relationships with the person they're talking about.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I just love the process of working with other actors.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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