John Cusack

Well, I think any actor can probably identify with being a professional liar. You don't always look at yourself that way, but I know a lot of days I do.

Of course, I think it is legitimate for the Commander-in-Chief to be concerned for the safety of his soldiers.

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

Sometimes you meet people and you feel like you've known them for a long time.

It's a very frightening time when something as basic as due process is seen as somehow radical.

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

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.

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

I am rich enough.

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.

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 try not to dwell on the past. I'm not a big go-back-and-try-to-relive-your-past kinda person.

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.

I have a bit of a rebellious nature.

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.

I guess maybe I'm idealistic.

Texas women have an amazing sense of purpose when they lose it. They're the best girls in the world - they're loyal and fun, but when they get mad, they'll try to kill you.

I was a teen star. That's disgusting enough.

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

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

New York's like a boxing match. In Hollywood, it's like a Fellini movie or something.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you're a movie star, there's a cycle you go through: adoration, adulation, you're used, and then you're discarded. And it happens again and again, always in that sequence.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

A lot of people are not meant to be together.

I was never interested in being an overly public person.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I feel like I'm a filmmaker; I don't feel I need to yell action and cut.

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 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.

I never wanted to come off as self-important.

I was raised Irish Catholic, but I don't consider myself Irish Catholic: I consider myself me, an American.

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

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.

The elderly have so much to offer. Theyre our link with history.

The British keep employing me, and that makes me like them. It also makes me think they're very intelligent.

The minute you realize that your options are unlimited, things just start falling into place all around you.

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

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.

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

Art is spiritual.

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

I just love the process of working with other actors.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

But no, I don't really like romantic comedies, so I don't really care. I never go see 'em.

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.

I was raised Catholic until I was old enough to say no.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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