Naomi Alderman

Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women's lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable.

I wish that positions of power dependent on education were as open to abused children, poor children, working-class children as they are to the children of the rich and successful. I really wish that were true.

I wish it were true that every child had access to an education that helped them reach their full potential.

Our culture tends to denigrate things that are associated with women. It's OK for women to wear trousers, for example, but not OK for men to wear skirts.

We all know that the desire for perfection can get in the way of authenticity and enjoyment; it's the same with games. There's a completist part to many of us that can't rest until we reach the perfect 100% finish point.

Traditions are always puzzling to those who don't share them. I'm Jewish, so the idea of a 'perfect family Christmas' is foreign to me.

I've only got anywhere with Minecraft by getting my friends to explain it.

Writing is investigation.

Expect to be disgusted by your own early work. If writing is your vocation, if you hope that it might be your salvation, push on through the disgust until you find one true sentence, a few words that say more than you expected, something you didn't know until you set it down.

Let's teach boys at school the personally and economically valuable skills of self-expression and emotional intelligence, of mediation and problem-solving.

We urgently need to address the assumption bound up in our employment laws and custody arrangements that women are the 'natural child carers' and men don't really want much to do with their children.

What I want is a world where neither gender nor sex are destiny. Where no child is ever told there's anything they can't do, or must do, 'because you're a boy' or 'because you're a girl.' It's not a world where anything is 'taken' from anyone - it's one where everyone's possibilities are enlarged.

Utopias and dystopias can exist side by side, even in the same moment. Which one you're in depends entirely on your point of view.

Personal trainers, however nice, give me PE teacher flashbacks.

What makes 'The Handmaid's Tale' so terrifying is that everything that happens in it is plausible.

We human beings get nervous if we don't know what's going on. It's the rule for creating scary stories: the unknown is always more frightening than the known.

When a marriage founders, this may well be cause for tremendous sadness, but it's not a failure of spirit or character. People change, their goals and dreams alter, their ideas of themselves grow, or they just meet someone they like better.

I honestly can't think of many more truly romantic gestures than a really well-thought-through prenuptial agreement.

Twitter's strength - and its weakness - is that it makes it extremely easy to share every passing thought with everyone on your friends list.

While 'Iron Man' is tremendous fun, it's another reminder of the pressure on all of us to make ourselves increasingly perfect and a little less human. And that is something it is important to resist.

Computer games can be works of art and literature - they're still developing. The stories they can tell, and the experiences they provide, are increasingly sophisticated and glorious.

As a gamer, I can't think of anything more annoying for everyone concerned than playing games in a shared living room.

Just as readers often turn into writers, novel-writers often become novel-reviewers.

The value of the arts cannot be measured by its ability to preserve life but rather to enhance existence.

I got my first library card, for Hendon Library in north London, when I was two years old.

I have no wish to offend, but I do think that holy cows need challenging.

The arts are valuable because they increase our sense of what it means to be human, not because of any specific skill or ability they confer.

If something is a problem, it's all right to admit it.

One of the hardest challenges posed by the modern world is how to deal with abundance. It's even harder to confront because admitting that it's a problem seems spoiled.

Games don't cause racism. But the real-time chat makes nasty comments hard to moderate and easy to spread.

Gaming is our cultural bogeyman - we blame it for everything from child obesity to violence to short attention spans. But any explanation that fits every situation ultimately explains nothing.

If you hold strong convictions against gay marriage, you shouldn't apply for a job as a registrar.

Too many keep-fit ideas are designed for those who are already fit, and they're just no fun.

My childhood was full of shocks and alarums, and I had to work a long time to make a life that pleases me.

Feminists are asking the practical questions about how you want to live your life.

It's absolutely delightful to get dressed up for a lovely evening, but when it goes from being a fun thing to being a chore, and a chore that men don't have to do, then we need to think about it differently.

The women's movement gave me a set of tools to think about things like my body and how people react to me and the way that my dating life was going. It's a very practical movement - yes, it's about issues like how we can get more women MPs elected, but it's also about how feminism affects things like your relationship.

I like things that take you by the hand and say, 'You think you know about this - you think you understand it - but there's so much that you don't.'

Attending a book group is always a salutary experience for a writer. There's no guarantee that the people there will have enjoyed your book, and, as anyone who has taken part in a book group will know, half the fun is in ripping a book you haven't liked to shreds.

No one should ever feel obliged to speak or to put themselves out publicly online, but I do think it's a good thing to do. The more of us who are women, making our work and just going 'Here I am, here's my work,' the easier it gets for everybody. It's a good thing to do.

Sometimes you feel like the people who invest in hate are winning. Then you just want to talk about love and what it really means to love yourself.

I love books. I want to read them, and I want to own them so they're always available to be reread.

I am someone who really would like to see more women in government, but Palin makes me cringe every time I hear about her.

As someone who went to school in the '70s and '80s, I can't say that I noticed much of a 'medals for all' culture myself.

Competitive sports may be where exercise becomes 'fun' for children who are good at it, but for those who are less talented, it is where exercise becomes not only physically demanding but also emotionally painful and socially humiliating.

For millennia, human beings have been finding new ways to look at the world through each others' eyes: from projecting ourselves onto the characters in novels or movies to dressing up in costume to devouring the details of some celebrity's life in 'Hello' or 'OK.'

The hilarity or brilliance of a forwarded link is inversely proportional to the number of people it's sent to.

I hate to be one of those people who forwards links to 'hilarious pictures' or 'brilliant games' to half their contacts database.

I've been a comics fan since my first hit of those gateway drawings: Judy, Asterix, and the TV cartoon 'Spider-Man and his Amazing Friend' - which naturally led me to Spider-Man comics.

More choice doesn't make us happy, and we understand that no one has infinite choices about how to live life.