A biography for John Cusackhasn’t been written yet.
“Sometimes you meet people and you feel like you've known them for a long time.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I have a bit of a rebellious nature.”
“Every role you do is kind of a side of yourself. That's why they give you the part.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I am rich enough.”
“Usually I do everything reverse. I practice something in movies and then I try it in real life.”
“New York's like a boxing match. In Hollywood, it's like a Fellini movie or something.”
“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.”
“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 feel like I'm a filmmaker; I don't feel I need to yell action and cut.”