Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Naomi Alderman

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

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.'

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.

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.

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.

Writing is investigation.

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 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'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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.'

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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'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!

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I am a geek, and proud of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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 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.

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

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

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.

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

I hated sports at school. Almost everyone did.

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