Ronson Quotes & Sayings

I guess the best thing about having a successful record like this is, like, I know I'm at least good for another five years, like, before everyone starts to like - all the haters start to come out again. And that's really what it is. — Mark Ronson

He said ... Everyone's attention span is so short. They'll be mad about something new today. — Jon Ronson

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

His idea was that humans totally lose control of their behavior in a crowd. — Jon Ronson

Fiction seemed all about harnessing infinity. In fiction, when you walk into a restaurant and you sit down, there's nobody there and the restaurant doesn't exist. The restaurant is a horrific, never-ending nothingness. So you make scattershot decisions about what the restaurant might look like and the person you might be sitting with. — Jon Ronson

We were creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland. — Jon Ronson

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. — Jon Ronson

His name was Roger Stone. And he was the man who first introduced Alex Jones to his close friend Donald Trump. * — Jon Ronson

I kept remembering something Michael Fertik had said to me at the Village Pub in Woodside. 'The biggest lie,' he said, 'is "The Internet is about you." We like to think of ourselves as people who have choice and taste and personalized content. But the Internet isn't about us. It's about the companies that dominate the data flows of the Internet. — Jon Ronson

I think that that spirit, or at least the raucousness of maybe that, is in there. And then yeah, like, along the way, you fine tune it 'cause you're thinking, like, OK, we need to now turn this into a song. — Mark Ronson

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

He had twenty followers. Some were people I knew from real life, who were probably wondering why I'd suddenly become so passionate about fusion cooking and candid about dreaming about cock. — Jon Ronson

I didn't start making music in order to be famous. — Mark Ronson

Aplomb. I had managed to portray myself as a good Jew and, — Jon Ronson

The DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99 ... There are currently 374 mental disorders. I bought the book ... and leafed through it ... I closed the manual. "I wonder if I've got any of the 374 mental disorders," I thought. I opened the manual again. And instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones. — Jon Ronson

Others took exception to being forced to wear little-girl-type dresses (a psychopath-devised punishment for noncooperation in the program). — Jon Ronson

You know, like, there's songs like "Valerie" and "Bang Bang Bang" that I was so proud of. And, you know, the level of success that they had - if they were little cult hits meant that, you know, I could sellout Webster Hall or Williamsburg Musical Hall or the El Rey theater in LA. Like, that was having made it to me. So the thought of having a number one song in my own career, like, never even registered. — Mark Ronson

Success is always less funny than failure. — Jon Ronson

I wondered what sort of woman loved a man like that. — Jon Ronson

Can't you see? It's incredibly interesting. Aren't you struck by how much action occurred simply because something went wrong with one man's brain? It's as if the rational world, your world, was a still pond and Petter's brain was a jagged rock thrown into it, creating odd ripples everywhere." The — Jon Ronson

After the interview ended, Stone and I were ushered out. Alex had an interview with Ted Nugent to conduct. In the elevator, Stone scrutinized me. "When we try to assess threats," he said, "the kooks are almost always wearing snowsuits in 90-degree weather. — Jon Ronson

This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world's first-ever marathon nude psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths. Elliott's raw, naked, LSD-fueled sessions lasted for epic eleven day stretches. The psychopaths spent every waking moment journeying to their darkest corners in an attempt to get better. There were no distractions - no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least one hundred hours every week) of their feelings. When they got hungry, they sucked food through straws that protruded through the walls. As during Paul Bindrim's own nude psychotherapy sessions, the patients were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for one another ... — Jon Ronson

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. — Jon Ronson

We want to see ourselves as curious and open-minded and smart and understanding things in terms of context and nuance, but when someone tries to do that in the midst of a shaming they're turned on. — Jon Ronson

I just want you to know that it makes me feel like shit to do this." "And Jonah paused," Michael told me. "And then he said to me, no joke, he said, 'You know, I really don't care how you feel.'" Michael shook his head. "It was icy. — Jon Ronson

I am the neurological opposite of a psychopath, in that I feel anxious almost all the time. It must be great to not constantly feel like you've got someone living inside your face, shooting you with a mini Taser. — Jon Ronson

Bryna is convinced her children are bipolar, and I wasn't going to swoop into a stranger's home for an afternoon and tell them all they were normal. — Jon Ronson

I suppose it's no surprise that we feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurt - before, during, or after the hurting occurs. But it always comes as a surprise. In psychology it's known as cognitive dissonance. It's the idea that it feels stressful and painful for us to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time (like the idea that we're kind people and the idea that we've just destroyed someone). And so to ease the pain we create illusory ways to justify our contradictory behavior. — Jon Ronson

I consider it somewhat psychopathic to label someone from afar as a psychopath. We love nothing more than to declare other people insane, especially people we don't like. — Jon Ronson

Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death . . . It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death, did we not know that the human mind seldom arrives at truth up on any subject till it has first reached the extremity of error. - BENJAMIN RUSH, "AN ENQUIRY INTO THE EFFECTS OF PUBLIC PUNISHMENTS UPON CRIMINALS, AND UPON SOCIETY," MARCH 9, 1787 — Jon Ronson

the suspect, Colin Stagg, must be the person who introduces every single element. — Jon Ronson

what's the point in threatening them with imprisonment if they break the terms of their parole? The threat has no meaning for them." He — Jon Ronson

The way we construct consciousness is to tell the story of ourselves to ourselves, the story of who we believe we are. I feel that a really public shaming or humiliation is a conflict between the person trying to write his own narrative and society trying to write a different narrative for the person. One story tries to overwrite the other. And so to survive you have to own your story. Or . . .' Mike looked at me, '. . . you write a third story. You react to the narrative that's been forced upon you.' He paused. 'You have to find a way to disrespect the other narrative,' he said. 'If you believe it, it will crush you.' I — Jon Ronson

Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, he explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you'd expect of a psychopath. — Jon Ronson

One of my dad's colleagues said, "She wants to paint with her shit. Maybe we should give her paints." And it worked.' Mary Barnes eventually became a celebrated and much-exhibited artist. Her paintings were greatly admired throughout the 1960s and 1970s for illustrating the mad, colourful, painful, exuberant, complicated inner life of a schizophrenic. — Jon Ronson

You remain with the person you've just been yelling at until the resentments fizzle. That's how wounds heal. — Jon Ronson

A life had been ruined. What was it for: just some social media drama? I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we've created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It's all very sweeping, and not the way we actually are as people. — Jon Ronson

Stone announced in early April that if delegates at the Republican National Convention had the nerve to switch from Trump to another candidate, "we will disclose [their] hotels and room numbers." Anderson — Jon Ronson

What happened, Bob explained to us now, although we didn't need telling, was that Jack Abbott was a psychopath. He couldn't bear being disrespected. His self-worth was too grandiose for that. He couldn't control his impulses. "When — Jon Ronson

Alex was growing in prominence. I noticed him trending on Twitter from time to time, for telling his now millions of fans that U.S. scientists were covertly creating "man-fish hybrids," that atheists "worship Lucifer," and that the government puts secret chemicals in juice boxes to turn Americans gay: "After you're done drinking your little juices you're ready to put makeup on, wear a short skirt, put together a garden of roses or something." And — Jon Ronson

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. — Jon Ronson

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. — Jon Ronson

I didn't realize he was a drunk driver,' I said. 'The other superheroes inferred it was just a regular, random guy you were trying to force a taco onto. But still' - I indicate the nearby crack dealers - 'the Taco Incident surely demonstrates how things can inadvertently spiral. — Jon Ronson

The cologne you pick should make you feel good when you go out with it. I think confidence comes across more than any other of our attributes. — Mark Ronson

She chuckled to herself, pressed send, and wandered around the airport for half an hour, sporadically checking Twitter. "I got nothing," she told me. "No replies." I imagined her feeling a bit deflated about this - that sad feeling when nobody congratulates you for being funny, that black silence when the Internet doesn't talk back. — Jon Ronson

The alt-right's small gains in popularity will not be enough to win Trump the election. This is not Germany in the 1930s. All that's changed is that one of Alex's fans - one of those grumpy looking middle-aged men sitting in David Icke's audience - is now the Republican nominee. But if some disaster unfolds - if Hillary's health declines further, or she grows ever more off-puttingly secretive - and Trump gets elected, he could bring Alex and the others with him. The idea of Donald Trump and Alex Jones and Roger Stone and Stephen Bannon having power over us - that is terrifying. THE — Jon Ronson

I was never really a writer, I was always more of a performer. — Mick Ronson

I think, you know, for me, whatever I need to slot into to make that music the best it can be or help the artists, or whoever I'm working with, achieve whatever vision they have in their head for a song. — Mark Ronson

Google has the informal corporate motto of "don't be evil", but they make money when anything happens online, even the bad stuff.' In — Jon Ronson

I had a somewhat frenetic childhood because my mum and dad split up when I was five, and then my mum remarried. — Mark Ronson

A stab had clearly once been made at de-uglifying these public spaces by painting a corridor a jaunty yellow. This was because, it turned out, babies come here to have their brains tested and someone thought the yellow might calm them. But I couldn't see how. Such was the oppressive ugliness of this building it would have been like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald. — Jon Ronson

Scattered throughout the week were a surprising number of speeches about how we may be killed by undocumented immigrants driving drunk. I — Jon Ronson

Had Kurt Cobain not committed suicide in 1994, would his genius have survived the continuous incisions of a media that was only too proud of its ability to chisel away at his fragile psyche in the years before he decided that he'd had enough off their invasions? And, had Jimi Hendrix not passed way in 1970, would he, too have eventually fallen into decline, first equalled, then eclipsed by the brilliant wave of new guitarists: Robin Trower, Ritchie Blackmore, Mick Ronson, who emerged during the early 1970s? In death, Hendrix led by example: in life he could have been left for the dead. — Dave Thompson

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. — Jon Ronson

A tiny little baby!' says Tam. 'People look at me like I'm an animal. People who don't know me judge me. I always remember going up to visit someone in prison, and this woman was sitting there. She was looking at me, growling a bit, and I could imagine what she was thinking: "There's a pedophile!" Anyway, I later discovered about her character. And I'll tell you, it outweighed anything I'd ever done.'
'What had she done?' I ask.
'Shoplifting,' says Tam.
There is silence. — Jon Ronson

My grandmother always used to wear this English perfume called Tuberose and then she died and then I dated this girl who wore the same thing. Every time I hung out with her, I could only think of my recently deceased grandmother. So sometimes a signature scent can be good and sometimes it can be bad. — Mark Ronson

Practically every prime-time program is populated by people who are just the right sort of mad, and I now knew what the formula was. The right sort of mad are people who are a bit madder than we fear we're becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren't as anxious as they are. We might be paranoid but we aren't as paranoid as they are. We are entertained by them, and comforted that we're not as mad as they are. — Jon Ronson

I got into DJ'ing because I started to listen to New York radio a lot. Obviously, I knew the stuff everybody knew, like Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, but I heard "Who Got the Props" by Black Moon, and I went up to this kid in my school with the Walkman on and was like, "What is this? You must tell me how I can get this now." Because there was no Shazam or googling lyrics. — Mark Ronson

People who are normal (i.e., sane, sensible) don't try to open lines of communication with total strangers by writing them a series of disjointed, weird, cryptic messages. — Jon Ronson

At the end of our conversation she (Martha Stout) turned to address you, the reader. She said if you're beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you're feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one. — Jon Ronson

In fact, ever since I first learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing it everywhere. — Jon Ronson

I think Katy B encapsulates young London in a way I never could. She reps London harder than anyone song-wise since Lily Allen. — Mark Ronson

Shall we go?' he murmured, perhaps regretting his decision to show me his army of plastic cartoon figurines. — Jon Ronson

I, personally, no longer take part in the ecstatic public condemnation of people unless they've committed a transgression that has an actual victim, and even then not as much as I probably should. I miss the fun a little. But it feels like when I became a vegetarian. I missed the steak, although not as much as I'd anticipated, but I could no longer ignore the slaughterhouse. — Jon Ronson

We're living in post-nuance online times. — Jon Ronson

I spent a few hours with Mercedes. She was, on the surface, quite troll-like - a lover of jubilant online chaos. She told me about her favorite 4chan thread. It was started by "a guy who's genuinely in love with his dog, and his dog went in heat, and so he went around collecting samples and injecting them into his penis and he fucked his dog and got her pregnant and they're his puppies." Mercedes laughed. "That's the thread I told the FBI about when they asked me about 4chan, and some of the officers actually got up and left the room. — Jon Ronson

I really love something about being around the recording studios - you know, like, those days in the '80s they'd be, like, in the studio 'til 4, 5, 6 in the morning working on these songs. — Mark Ronson

Trump was praising Operation Wetback - a 1954 endeavor in which Mexicans were rounded up and dumped in the wilderness, where they were stranded without food or possessions and 88 of them died in the heat.) These — Jon Ronson

And sometimes, I'd be allowed to be hanging out in the studio, which I just loved kind of, like, being in the room with these big recording desks, with all these, like, buttons and knobs and watching the guys use them. — Mark Ronson

There are obviously a lot of very ill people out there. But there are also people in the middle, getting overlabeled, becoming nothing more than a big splurge of madness in the minds of the people who benefit from it. — Jon Ronson

D'Angelo could sing the phonebook and it would sound good. — Mark Ronson

Our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow, that the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a shaming. All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame, and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to instinctively slap shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks. — Jon Ronson

Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity? — Jon Ronson

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

How you feed your family is not how we feed our family. For real. We're not out here just for the fun and just for the show-and-tell. This is real life. I am finding myself ostentatiously nodding at everything the crack dealers are saying, I suppose in the hope that if the shooting starts they'll remember my nods and make the effort to shoot around me. — Jon Ronson

I didn't really get that good at cutting because I didn't have those three years of gestating and nurturing my skills in the bedroom. I was kind of, like, out and playing in clubs after three of four months, because I was pushy with promoters. But I would just listen to the radio - Stretch Armstrong and Red Alert - and then I would go hang out with Mayhem, who did the WNYU hip-hop show. — Mark Ronson

I didn't want to write a book that advocated for a less curious world. Prurient curiosity may not be great. But curiosity is. People's flaws need to be written about. The flaws of some people lead to horrors inflicted on others. And then there are the more human flaws that, when you shine a light onto them, de-demonize people who might otherwise be seen as ogres. — Jon Ronson

Please ejaculate", I silently urged the man, "so I can go to sleep". (In this way I imagine I was like millions of women before me — Jon Ronson

Basically, there's a good friend of mine who works at EMI Publishing, a publishing company. He had asked me - he was like, you know, do you know this girl, Amy Winehouse? She's in New York for a day. She's kind of meeting people to maybe work with on her second album. — Mark Ronson

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. — Jon Ronson

I told a journalist that Dave seemed quite psychopathic (I didn't know a thing about psychopaths but I assumed that that was the sort of thing they might do). — Jon Ronson

We're creating a culture where people feel constantly surveilled, where people are afraid to be themselves. — Jon Ronson

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. — Jon Ronson

I should be campaigning for his release in print in a way that appeared crusading but actually wasn't quite effective enough to work. Like planting barely noticeable seeds of doubt into the prose. Subtle. I — Jon Ronson

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. — Jon Ronson

Yeah,' said Al. 'I'm very prone to boredom. I gotta go do something. Yeah. That's a fair statement. I'm not the most relaxed person in the world. My mind does not stop working all night.'
'Manipulative?' I said.
'I think you could describe that as leadership,' he said. 'Inspire! I think it's called leadership. — Jon Ronson

Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse. — Jon Ronson

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. — Jon Ronson

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

One man was saying, 'It cost me a new SUV for my wife,'" Andrew said. "Another said, 'It cost me a cruise to the Bahamas and a new kitchen.' Everyone was laughing. — Jon Ronson

White supremacists were thrilled by Bannon's appointment. One of them declared on a radio show hosted by David Duke, the former KKK leader, "Something astonishing has happened. We appear to have taken over the Republican Party." How — Jon Ronson

The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche. — Jon Ronson

I vaguely remembered hearing psychologists say there was a preponderance of psychopaths at the top - in the corporate and political worlds - a clinical absence of empathy being a benefit in those environments. — Jon Ronson

We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside it. — Jon Ronson

You have to put these hooks in it, you know? You've got to make sure you got all that ear candy in it to get it through the gate. — Mark Ronson

Is Obama satanic?" he asked me. I was grateful for the conversation starter - I consider anything that staves off social awkwardness to be a blessing - but I couldn't lie. — Jon Ronson

The killer's name was Michael Stone and he was a known psychopath. He had previous convictions. But the law stated that only patients whose mental disorders were considered treatable could be detained beyond their prison sentences. Psychopaths were considered untreatable and so Michael Stone had to be free. — Jon Ronson

Wow, I say, politely, but I don't feel it. I'm like a sociopath when it comes to expensive cars. I feel no emotion. — Jon Ronson

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. — Jon Ronson

So sometimes if I'm working with a rapper, like Ghostface Killah or Nas, producing usually means, in hip-hop, that you make the music. You make the beat, and you give it to them. And they write the rhymes. — Mark Ronson