Quotes By John Cusack

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 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 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 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.

Every role you do is kind of a side of yourself. That's why they give you the part.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I am rich enough.

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

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.

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

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

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.

A lot of people are not meant to be together.

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

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.

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.