Usually I do everything reverse. I practice something in movies and then I try it in real life.
— John Cusack
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.
It's a very frightening time when something as basic as due process is seen as somehow radical.
I just love the process of working with other actors.
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.
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.
Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?
Usually I play people who just keep babbling on and on and on.
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.
People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.
I've seen the people who talk about their love lives in print invariably have doomed relationships with the person they're talking about.
I was never interested in being an overly public person.
I like the George Romero films, which were really great, social satire movies; really twisted.
I feel like I'm a filmmaker; I don't feel I need to yell action and cut.
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.
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.
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.
Well, any time you do anything good, it's man versus himself, right? That's the art, the challenge.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think 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.
New York's like a boxing match. In Hollywood, it's like a Fellini movie or something.
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.
The British keep employing me, and that makes me like them. It also makes me think they're very intelligent.
Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme.
I was raised Irish Catholic, but I don't consider myself Irish Catholic: I consider myself me, an American.
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.
I have a bit of a rebellious nature.
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.
Being on a movie set is like one long financial crisis.
A lot of people are not meant to be together.
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 try not to dwell on the past. I'm not a big go-back-and-try-to-relive-your-past kinda person.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes you meet people and you feel like you've known them for a long time.
If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.
I was raised Catholic until I was old enough to say no.
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.
I guess maybe I'm idealistic.
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.
Art is spiritual.
I was a teen star. That's disgusting enough.
