Quotes from Jon Ronson

If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

As somebody back then wrote, "Facebook is where you lie to your friends, Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers.

We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

A lot of people move around in life chronically ashamed of how they look, or how they feel, or what they said, or what they did. It's like a permanent adolescent concern. Adolescence is when you're permanently concerned about what other people think of you.

Oh, you know what bloggers are like, they write and write and write. I don't know why, because they're not being paid.

That's an incredibly depressing thought," I said "that if you're in a room and at one end lies madness and at the other end lies sanity it is human nature to veer towards the madness end.

Most goat-related military activity is still highly classified.

W]e need to think twice about raining down vengeance and anger as our default position.

Serial killers ruin families,' shrugged Bob. 'Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.

But on the extremist side I didn't get any rejections at all. Everyone agreed to talk to me.

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.

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.

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.

My paranoia never ends, but I haven't been paranoid about being spied on my shadowy forces for some time now.

You can say anything to David Icke and he will accept it and put it into his ideology.

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

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.

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.

Misuse of privilege is seen as the worst sin.

My entry into screenwriting was not smooth.

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 consider myself a social justice person.

Trying to solve the mystery is what I enjoy most about writing.

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