John Cusack Quotes

I had a very difficult upbringing.

I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.

I didn't have a good childhood growing up.

I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.

The one thing that made me somewhat of an animal is I didn't have anything growing up.

I had a bad background just growing up as a child.

I had a very rough upbringing.

It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.

I came from nothing. We didn't have money, so I started work at 14 because I really needed the money.

I was 10th of 11 kids in an alcoholic, abusive, poor family. We all want things that we can't have. And I found comedy.

My life growing up was a twisted Bronx version of 'The Color Purple.' It had a much different soundtrack and no trees, but that desperation was the same.

Every single person in jail for a violent crime had a nightmare childhood.

My childhood was appalling.

I have spent a lot of time listening to people who are serving life sentences and getting to know them and the circumstances of their lives. I have never met anyone serving a long prison sentence who had anything close to what I could call a childhood; instead, the upbringings always - always - involve extreme situations of poverty and abuse.

I didn't have much of a childhood, but that's O.K. I have a livelihood.

They said if I stayed in the orphanage for another month or so, I basically would not have been able to be alive.

I came from a broken family.

Mum grew up in Wythenshawe, one of 12. My mum didn't really go to school and didn't see the need for education, she got bullied so she excluded herself.

I was dyslexic and uneducated and left school at 14. I grew up in Finsbury Park, which was a pretty bad place where you had to fight and be beaten. It was just a constant roundabout of violence.

Hunger can bring out the worst in us.

We hid from the Nazis in the mountains. Sometimes there was nothing to eat but snow.

I had the misfortune of being born in a horrendous situation.

Because I grew up in a single parent home with my mom, growing up, things weren't always the best.

Home was never a safe place for me. I felt safer on the streets.

We had nothing in hand and my father used to live on the street. The profession of acting happened to him when B.R. Chopra picked him up for a film, and my father acted just to earn money for survival.