Words matter. These are the best Jon Ronson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Sometimes labeling is only useful, like with OCD. Once you’re labeled you can be treated. On other occasions labeling leads to tyranny, like with childhood bipolar disorder in the U.S.
Film isn’t a meritocracy; there’s no system ensuring the best screenplays get produced. It’s a hustle.
If I interview somebody for an hour, I’m looking for four amazing minutes.
I did feel like they were telling me that something like that was going to happen. Not specifically – not that planes were going to be flown into the World Trade Center or anything like that – but in the general sense.
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.
Film is like a casserole. Everybody is thrown into a pot, and we’re all in it together.
Shaming is powerful and useful. I’m living in New York, and my instinct is that, after the Black Lives Matter protests, which were organized on social media, the chance of there being another Eric Garner, choked to death in New York by an NYPD officer, has diminished.
I consider myself a social justice person.
The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people.
I wasn’t in any way a kind of soothsayer or not surprised when Sept. 11 happened. I was absolutely shocked.
Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book.
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.
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.
Everyone’s constantly scrambling around trying to justify their own cruel behavior, trying to come up with psychological tricks to make themselves not feel bad.
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.
I’m not what you’d call a fearless type of person.
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.
I just don’t think I’m very good at fiction.
I felt very strongly about the Ashley Madison thing. Of the 39 million people who signed up for Ashley Madison, only a tiny percentage of them actually had an affair. And I’d go a step further and say even if they did, it’s none of our business, frankly.
Of course there’s systemic misogyny in certain parts of our culture and systemic racism and a wider range of insults women have to face.
But on the extremist side I didn’t get any rejections at all. Everyone agreed to talk to me.
But when I was doing the KKK I had constant nightmares of being exposed as a Jew and lynched by the Klan.
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.
What I think was a really lucky coincidence was that a lot of the themes of ‘Okja’ are things I write about a lot: cognitive dissonance and corporate greed and also the internal politics of fringe groups.
