Top 100 John Cusack Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Maybe the absence of signs is a sign.”

— John Cusack

2. “I’m not making any plans. I’m just going to let the universe surprise me.”

— John Cusack

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

— John Cusack

4. “The elderly have so much to offer. They’re our link with history.”

— John Cusack

5. “Sometimes you meet people and you feel like you’ve known them for a long time.”

— John Cusack

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

— John Cusack

7. “Do I listen to pop music because I’m miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?”

— John Cusack

8. “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.”

— John Cusack

9. “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

10. “If you’re looking at things with the right set of eyes, people are endlessly fascinating. And then, of course, if you look at it the wrong way, then the whole world is horrible and tedious and boring. That’s the battle, really – to keep looking at the world in the right way.”

— John Cusack

11. “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.”

— John Cusack

12. “It never hurts to be involved in any political or activist organization. I can never see how participation would be a bad thing. The key is being true to what you participate with and who.”

— John Cusack

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

— John Cusack

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

— John Cusack

15. “I think everything has some politics to it. It’s just whether or not it admits to it. Politics is weird. I don’t even know what that means any more.”

— John Cusack

16. “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

Featured in: Fun Quotes

17. “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.”

— John Cusack

18. “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.”

— John Cusack

19. “I always liked it when people go back in time to discover things about themselves, like with ‘A Christmas Carol’ and you’re getting a tour of your life by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.”

— John Cusack

20. “I’m a paranoid schizophrenic. I am my own entourage!”

— John Cusack

21. “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

22. “I grew up in Evanston and lived in Chicago for a long time, in Old Town and Wrigleyville. I did three films when I was in high school. The first was ‘Class,’ with Rob Lowe. I had a supporting role in that.”

— John Cusack

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

— John Cusack

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

— John Cusack

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— John Cusack

26. “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

27. “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.”

— John Cusack

28. “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

29. “I was raised Irish Catholic, but I don’t consider myself Irish Catholic: I consider myself me, an American.”

— John Cusack

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.”

— John Cusack

31. “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.”

— John Cusack

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

— John Cusack

33. “The ages two to 15 I spent at different stages of shortness. I didn’t become a tall person until I was 16.”

— John Cusack

34. “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.”

— John Cusack

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

— John Cusack

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

— John Cusack

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

— John Cusack

38. “It’s a very frightening time when something as basic as due process is seen as somehow radical.”

— John Cusack

39. “A lot of people are not meant to be together.”

— John Cusack

40. “I was a teen star. That’s disgusting enough.”

— John Cusack

41. “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.”

— John Cusack

42. “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

43. “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.”

— John Cusack

44. “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.”

— John Cusack

45. “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

46. “In the future, there is no future.”

— John Cusack

47. “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.”

— John Cusack

48. “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

49. “It’s supposed to feel good to throw a brick at the right people. There is a long tradition of naming and ridiculing and shaming and calling the villains what they are. Usually it was the artistocracy of the day and satire was the only way to speak truth to power.”

— John Cusack

50. “I have a bit of a rebellious nature.”

— John Cusack