Top 100 John Cusack Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— John Cusack

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

— John Cusack

53. “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

54. “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.”

— John Cusack

55. “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

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

— John Cusack

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

— John Cusack

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “My point was that it’s hard to make good films, but I’m not under any illusion that you do all the time.”

— John Cusack

63. “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

64. “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

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

— John Cusack

66. “I feel like I’m a filmmaker; I don’t feel I need to yell action and cut.”

— John Cusack

67. “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

68. “I was never interested in being an overly public person.”

— John Cusack

69. “Once you have opened up prisoner interrogation, wiretapping, border patrol, jailing and the services of the military, when this has been turned into a for-profit business in this endless war, then we’re in deep trouble.”

— John Cusack

70. “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

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

— John Cusack

72. “I don’t tend to think in terms of a moral authority – be a good boy, do good things – more in terms of what feels right.”

— John Cusack

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

— John Cusack

74. “I think it’s very improtant and healthy to tell differnt stories than the corporatist narratives we are being asked to swallow hook, line and sinker.”

— John Cusack

75. “I just love the process of working with other actors. It’s like jamming with a musician, except it takes a little more effort to get to that place as an actor, because you have the cameras and lights and everything. But I love jamming with these people.”

— John Cusack

76. “The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is dizzyingly brilliant. Mark Leyner is a hyperkinetic shaman, who flies the banner of rum and candy and writes like a one-eyed feral bandit. His new book is supremely original, delirious and synapse-shattering.”

— John Cusack

77. “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

78. “Usually I play people who just keep babbling on and on and on.”

— John Cusack

79. “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.”

— John Cusack

80. “I never wanted to come off as self-important.”

— John Cusack

81. “When you see a culture where the intellectual architects of the invasion are not shamed for their behavior but rewarded within the mainstream media culture, black comedy, satire, absurdism is the only response.”

— John Cusack

82. “No, actors go out with actresses as a form of self-flagellation.”

— John Cusack

83. “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.”

— John Cusack

84. “I guess maybe I’m idealistic.”

— John Cusack

85. “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

86. “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.”

— John Cusack

87. “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.”

— John Cusack

88. “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.”

— John Cusack

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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.”

— John Cusack

92. “Roy, the guy I play in ‘The Grifters,’ is a guy who had a very bleak life. His mother had him at 13, and then when she was 17 or 18 and he was 4 or 5, they were trapped in a small Texas town somewhere, and she was ready to do anything to get out.”

— John Cusack

93. “Poe had this curious kind of alchemical courage, where he took all the terrible things and terrors that happened in his life, all this shame and fear and pain, and turned them into great works of art. He was a complex, brilliant person who was just wired too tight.”

— John Cusack

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

— John Cusack

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

— John Cusack

96. “The British keep employing me, and that makes me like them. It also makes me think they’re very intelligent.”

— John Cusack

97. “I was raised Catholic until I was old enough to say no.”

— John Cusack

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

— John Cusack

99. “Every role you do is kind of a side of yourself. That’s why they give you the part.”

— John Cusack

100. “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.”

— John Cusack