Top 75 Naomi Alderman Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.’

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

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

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.

I have no wish to offend, but I do think that holy cows need challenging.

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.

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.

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 hate to be one of those people who forwards links to ‘hilarious pictures’ or ‘brilliant games’ to half their contacts database.

Writing is investigation.

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

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.

I hated sports at school. Almost everyone did.

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’ve got the brain for systems and a head for figures.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I wish that positions of power dependent on education were as open to abused children, poor children, working-class children as they are to the children of the rich and successful. I really wish that were true.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Expect to be disgusted by your own early work. If writing is your vocation, if you hope that it might be your salvation, push on through the disgust until you find one true sentence, a few words that say more than you expected, something you didn’t know until you set it down.

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

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

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.

The hilarity or brilliance of a forwarded link is inversely proportional to the number of people it’s sent to.

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

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

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.

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.

I’ve only got anywhere with Minecraft by getting my friends to explain it.

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

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

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.

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

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.

It’s absolutely delightful to get dressed up for a lovely evening, but when it goes from being a fun thing to being a chore, and a chore that men don’t have to do, then we need to think about it differently.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.