Naomi Alderman

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.'”

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

“Games don't cause racism. But the real-time chat makes nasty comments hard to moderate and easy to spread.”

“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 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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I wish it were true that every child had access to an education that helped them reach their full potential.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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