John Cusack Quotes

I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I think poets tell better history than historians. Historians lie all the time but the poets can get to truth of it.

In the future, there is no future.

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.

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.

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.

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

I have a bit of a rebellious nature.

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

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.

If you help manufacture an enemy that's really evil, you can point to the fact that it's really evil, and say, "Hey, it's really evil."

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.

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.

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.

The minute you realize that your options are unlimited, things just start falling into place all around you.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

All the choices we make in our life are pointless. There’s no escaping the inevitable.

I never wanted to come off as self-important.

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.

Justice always has context.

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.

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 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.

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

I'm not making any plans. I'm just going to let the universe surprise me.

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

Not only is America a country where torture is now policy. It's now outsourced. It's given to companies at a cost-plus basis. It's a triple whammy of surreal, absolute madness.

These guys who talk about free markets, they're not ideologues; they're crooks.

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.

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.

Poets are political, they have to be reflections of their times [because] they're living in their times... Poetry is political in that it's standing in opposition to fascism. Good poetry asks a bunch of questions and asks the audience to interact with themselves or see themselves in it; maybe you like it or you don't like it. But the fascist sort of stuff plays on your fears and tells you to jump on the party line and gives some simple excuses - blame this person.

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'm a paranoid schizophrenic. I am my own entourage!

These people say free markets are the way to go, but wink, wink, the markets aren't really free. They're just a protectionist racket, and we have to pay for it all on every level. It's really quite extraordinary, and immoral, and illegal. These things need to be named, and shamed, and outed, and mocked, and prosecuted.

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

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.

I don't agonize over decisions as much these days. The criteria of what's important to me is clear. The insecurity that you feel, and the paranoia that you feel, have been around for a long time - you know it's a liar because it's been lying to you all along - every time you start something new.