Naomi Alderman

It's hard to describe why one room and not another feels right for writing. Of course you have to train yourself to be able to write anywhere, but it's nice to feel that each book has a place that belongs to it, where it's home.

I hope that there are many more women out there writing bits of feminist sci-fi. And men, also - men are allowed to write feminist things.

I really hope that men read 'The Power' and watch 'The Handmaid's Tale' and read 'The Handmaid's Tale.'

I listen to terrible music when exercising. I mean, like, early Madonna, Boney M, the Fratellis, Shakira... I can't claim interesting musical taste.

I'd been to an Orthodox Jewish primary school where, every morning, the boys said, 'Thank you God for not making me a woman.' If you put that together with 'The Handmaid's Tale' in your head, something will eventually go fizz! Boom!

People who were always hardbodies love that competitive style of team-sports activity: they come up with timers and fitness contests and personal bests. But for the vast majority of people, competition in exercise is not fun. It's no fun to compete if you know you can never win.

It is a very different feeling to be in a fat body that is moving a lot to one that hardly moves at all. It feels like love. As simple and as joyful as that.

I hated sports at school. Almost everyone did.

The truth is, none of us is OK, not really. The best, most dear, most thoughtful and engaged and open and feminist men in my life have occasionally come out with some statement that's made me gasp. Then again, so have almost all the women.

I've been paid less than men I worked with who contributed less to the project.

In general, I'd rather ask questions and look stupid than keep quiet and not understand what someone's talking about.

No one in tech has ever been as sexist toward me as teachers and rabbis before I was 12 years old.

It's very easy for a writer to spend much too much time in her head.

I was there on 9/11. I watched the towers falling from my office window, at which point I decided I would give up my job at a law firm in Manhattan and come back to the U.K.

I find the sneeriness about 'selfie-culture' quite boring - I'm excited by young people taking control of their own images and finding out for themselves how much Photoshop has done for models.

Claude Cahun is a fascinating artist - one of the few women to be part of the surrealist movement, she and her partner Suzanne Malherbe took on men's names and made artworks that investigated female identity long before 'The Second Sex' or Cindy Sherman.

If gaming were seen as an art, the important question would be not whether games are good for us but whether they are good, full stop.

I've always had a real interest in the way that science fiction can portray a world that could be different to our world, which I find a really exciting thought.

If I'm working every day, it's like pumping a pump. When you start, rusty water comes out, and then it runs clear. I do it even if I get completely stuck.

The species will continue, whatever apocalypse we manage to unleash. It just won't be much fun to live through.

I get migraines. I've had them all my life; so has my dad. So did his grandmother, although back then they called them 'sick headaches.'

The thing about having true fans, it seems, is that they remain loyal to their idea of what the work meant to them. And that might make them more exacting than the toughest studio executive or publishing boss.

The gaming world isn't filled only with violence and depravity. In fact, it's mostly enchanting.

I find it particularly irritating, if I go to a games conference to speak about my work, that often it's presumed that I'm the marketing girl - that's annoying.

You learn the most from sitting down and doing the work, regularly, patiently, sometimes in hope, sometimes despairingly.

No human quality belongs to only one class of person. We all get to be both aggressive and loving. We all get to delight in our careers and revel in our children. We're all kind and brave, soft and hard, sciency and artsy, interested in being looked at and in admiring others' physical form. Everything.

I have a suspicion of lockstep and everyone looking in the same direction: that's a key character trait in me.

I think some people's brains have more of a natural bent towards God than others.

For years, I looked down on my mother for shopping at Asda, and now I feel very ashamed of it.

When I was 19, I wrote a novel, which was not very good, but I finished it.

I think when I was 7, at school they got us all to write the story of Joseph and his brothers. I got a bit carried away and wrote 12 pages - everybody else wrote a page. The teacher was so impressed by it that she put it up on the wall for parents' evening. I thought, 'Oh, this is something that I really like that I also seem to be quite good at.'

I've always been a reader of science fiction, and I have loved a lot of feminist science fiction.

You can't write a thing that is hermetically sealed; there has to be a way for the audience to get in and participate. I think that's a massively valuable discipline for any artist.

I was reading the Bible in Hebrew from a very young age, so that'll shape ideas about how words can move the world.

My parents are both intellectuals and readers; my mother would take me to the library every few days from before I was one year old.

I used to think there was something cheap in trying to make beautiful sentences. Now I think language has its own ways and ends, and it does one's thinking good to try to serve them. Beauty isn't truth. But a certain kind of clear beauty will help in the pursuit of truth.

I feel powerful when I'm onstage talking to an audience. I like communicating; it feels like my calling in the world. Knowing what you're meant to be doing with your life is pretty bloody powerful.

The demands of having to be 'masculine' are as damaging to men as the demands of having to be 'feminine' are to women. I wish we could all agree just to wash it all away. Begin again.

I don't think I have any particular problem with God.

I suppose the idea about all Orthodox religion is that it's a kind of submission, obedience.

There's some really good stuff in the way I was brought up. There's some really rubbish stuff as well.

I am a geek, and proud of it.

I grew up an Orthodox Jew, and now I'm not an Orthodox Jew. So I have sympathy for people who lose their faith.

I've got the brain for systems and a head for figures.

The worst things that ever happened to me were before I was 20. It has been slow, hard-won improvement since then.

I was incredibly inspired by Oprah Winfrey as a young woman.

After the novel was published, I came to feel that I couldn't call myself Orthodox anymore. It's so patriarchal, anti-women, anti-gay. There was something about writing 'Disobedience'... it felt like I had put it all in the book. I had done my best by it, recorded what it meant for me. I felt I was done.

I had a year of panic attacks. I was feeling really pressured, like I could never do it again. With a first novel, you put things on hold because it takes so much mental energy and self-belief to keep on writing.

The politics of fear are always the same. They are easily recognisable in retrospect. They are easy to acquiesce in at the time.