Quotes from Naomi Alderman

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Writing is investigation.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.