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

“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

“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

“I have a bit of a rebellious nature.”

— 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

“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 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

— 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

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

— John Cusack

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

— 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 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