Jon Ronson Quotes (23 Quotes)

They said, 'Come on, who would you rather have living next to you The crazy white-separatist Weavers or a family of respected FBI agents' ... The only answer I could come up with was, 'Whichever one plays their music quieter.'

I would be with Thom Robb for five days, then I'd go home for a few weeks, then I'd go back to Thom. The longest I was ever away was two weeks.

I certainly believe the Weavers were utterly innocent, were a threat to nobody, and if you can't believe crazy things on top of a mountain in Idaho, where can you believe crazy things

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

Rachel, in particular, was wise beyond her years, ... I think that if Rachel had been raised in North London, she'd be going to Starbucks and studying at art school and voting for Tony Blair.

The way I portrayed the people is accurate. Because they're human beings and we have a kind of wonderful capacity to be absurd and ridiculous.

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.

At first, I did stories on people who were maybe just eccentric. Omar was a natural progression from that.

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.

No. Spiritual is the wrong word. He's occultic. He's like a walking embodiment of death. He can stop you at a distance. He can influence physical events just with his mind. If he catches your attention he can stop you without touching you.

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

No, people back home don't realize why there is this kind of need for heroes in America at the moment. People in Britain don't really understand what's going on here. They don't understand why Camp X-ray exists.

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

In April 2001, Bert Rodriguez took on a new student. His name was Ziad Jarrah. Ziad just turned up at the US 1 Fitness Center one day and said he had heard that Bert was good. Why Ziad chose Bert, of all the martial arts instructors scattered around the Florida shoreline, is a matter of speculation. Maybe Bert's uniquely occultic reputation preceded him, or perhaps it was Bert's military connections. Plus, Bert had once taught the head of security for a Saudi prince. Maybe that was it.

When David says that 12-foot blood-drinking child-sacrificing pedophile lizards secretly rule the world, he really is referring to lizards.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 was the Arkansas Klansman Thom Robb, for example, who couldn't quite figure out where he fit in. He wanted to give the Klan an image makeover, by banning the robes and the hoods and the 'N word' -- as he always called it ... and hatred in general, ... even though his members were always sidling up to him and whispering, 'Uh, Thom, we kind of joined the Klan because we wanted to hate people.'

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.