Quotes from Naomi Alderman

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.