Literary Birthday – 10 May – Jon Ronson

Happy Birthday, Jon Ronson, born 10 May 1967.

Jon Ronson Quotes

Discover the time of day when you write best, and write then. For me it’s about 7 a.m. to noon. For other people it’s overnight. Try not to do anything other than write between those times.
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.
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.
Trying to solve the mystery is what I enjoy most about writing.
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.
[Journalists take] the outermost aspects of our interviewee’s personality, and we stitch them together like medieval monks. We leave the normal stuff on the floor.
Capitalism, at its most remorseless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy.
I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.
I crave routine and comfort massively. I’m not an adrenaline junkie at all. I only go and do these things because I have to so that I can write about them.
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.

Jon Ronson is a Welsh journalist, documentary filmmaker, radio presenter, and author. His books include The Men Who Stare at Goats, Lost At Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, and The Psychopath Test. He writes for City Life, Time Out, and The Guardian.