A biography for Naomi Aldermanhasn’t been written yet.
“Personal trainers, however nice, give me PE teacher flashbacks.”
“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.”
“As a gamer, I can't think of anything more annoying for everyone concerned than playing games in a shared living room.”
“I hated sports at school. Almost everyone did.”
“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.”
“Twitter's strength - and its weakness - is that it makes it extremely easy to share every passing thought with everyone on your friends list.”
“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.”
“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 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've only got anywhere with Minecraft by getting my friends to explain 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 worst things that ever happened to me were before I was 20. It has been slow, hard-won improvement since then.”
“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.'”
“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 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 think some people's brains have more of a natural bent towards God than others.”
“As someone who went to school in the '70s and '80s, I can't say that I noticed much of a 'medals for all' culture myself.”
“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.”
“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.”