Explore Quotes by Jon Ronson

My entry into screenwriting was not smooth.

I think if somebody is so set in their ways about what they feel about something - and you get this a lot in academia, of course, and also different sorts of journalism too - you're going to sweep under the carpet the facts that don't suit your thesis. And I think that happens quite a lot in the courtroom, for instance.

Discover the time of day when you write best, and write then. For me it's about 7 am to noon. For other people it's overnight. Try not to do anything other than write between those times.

We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding, we'd never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.

I'm not what you'd call a fearless type of person.

If I interview somebody for an hour, I'm looking for four amazing minutes.

The phrase 'misuse of privilege' is becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we choose to. It's becoming a devalued term, and it's making us lose our capacity for empathy and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions.

There's definitely evidence that capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior. When you look at the worst corners of the American health insurance industry or the sub-prime banking market, it really feels like the more psychopathically someone behaves, the more it's rewarded.

'Okja' I don't think would have been made if Netflix hadn't made it. That, to me, is a much bigger thing than whether someone watches it on a big screen or a phone. Because it simply wouldn't have existed otherwise.

I really admire Nick Hornby - for example, the way that he can make ordinary stuff so beautiful!

When we watch courtroom dramas, we tend to identify with the kindhearted defense attorney, but give us the power, and we become like hanging judges.

Film people can be quite ruthless and tough. I think it's because the industry is filled with talented, driven people chasing nowhere near enough work.

Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible.

Of course there are people who would like to eat breakfast without the screams of toddlers all around them, but those people should get over themselves and stop being stuck up and idiotic.

Yeah, but in the end his followers take what they want from his philosophy. Maybe it doesn't matter what's going on in David Icke's mind. It's how other people take him.

Nothing uniquely bad has happened to me in my personal life, but all the regular little bad things have accumulated to make me a neurotic person. And these adventures are my way of trying to make sense of that.

I wasn't in any way a kind of soothsayer or not surprised when Sept. 11 happened. I was absolutely shocked.

Maybe there's two types of people in the world: those people who favor humans over ideology, and those people who favor ideology over humans.

I have thought sometimes that the sanest people, the people who are just very balanced, very happy, are probably lower achieving than other people. My kind of irrationality happens to be fear or anxiety.

Well, I had nightmares when I was doing the Klan story all the time. I had a recurring nightmare of basically being exposed as a Jew inside the Klan compound.

But when I was doing the KKK I had constant nightmares of being exposed as a Jew and lynched by the Klan.