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.

Naomi Alderman

Women Relationship Men

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

World Wit Violence

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

Naomi Alderman

Time Politics Fear

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.

Naomi Alderman

Car Art Very

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.

Naomi Alderman

Time Sports Pet

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.

Naomi Alderman

Work Women Men

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.

Naomi Alderman

Mom Men Your

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.

Naomi Alderman

Would Window Wind

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.

Naomi Alderman

Violence Very Ultimately

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

Naomi Alderman

Women Time Men

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.

Naomi Alderman

Good Art Would

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

Naomi Alderman

Power Men Hope

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

Naomi Alderman

Romantic Men 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.'

Naomi Alderman

Teacher Good Car

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

Naomi Alderman

Life Your You

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.

Naomi Alderman

Experience Art Your

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

Naomi Alderman

Teacher Trainers Trainer

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

Naomi Alderman

Intelligence Valuable Tell

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

Naomi Alderman

Music Us Tin

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.

Naomi Alderman

Car Ways Way

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

Naomi Alderman

Very Us Trait

I hated sports at school. Almost everyone did.

Naomi Alderman

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.

Naomi Alderman

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

Naomi Alderman

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

Naomi Alderman

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

Naomi Alderman

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.

Naomi Alderman

I am a geek, and proud of it.

Naomi Alderman

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.

Naomi Alderman

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.

Naomi Alderman

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

Naomi Alderman

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!

Naomi Alderman

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

Naomi Alderman

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

Naomi Alderman

Writing is investigation.

Naomi Alderman

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

Naomi Alderman

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.'

Naomi Alderman

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.

Naomi Alderman

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.

Naomi Alderman

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.

Naomi Alderman

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.

Naomi Alderman

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.

Naomi Alderman

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.

Naomi Alderman

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.

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.

Naomi Alderman

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

Naomi Alderman

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

Naomi Alderman

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

Naomi Alderman

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

Naomi Alderman

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.

Naomi Alderman

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.'

Naomi Alderman