“The gaming world isn’t filled only with violence and depravity. In fact, it’s mostly enchanting.”
― Naomi Alderman
“As a gamer, I can’t think of anything more annoying for everyone concerned than playing games in a shared living room.”
― Naomi Alderman
“Sometimes you feel like the people who invest in hate are winning. Then you just want to talk about love and what it really means to love yourself.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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
“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
“More choice doesn’t make us happy, and we understand that no one has infinite choices about how to live life.”
― Naomi Alderman
“I was incredibly inspired by Oprah Winfrey as a young woman.”
― 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
“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
“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.”
― 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 honestly can’t think of many more truly romantic gestures than a really well-thought-through prenuptial agreement.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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
“Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women’s lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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.”
― Naomi Alderman
“I’ve only got anywhere with Minecraft by getting my friends to explain it.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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
“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
“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 hated sports at school. Almost everyone did.”
― 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
“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
“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
“I really hope that men read ‘The Power’ and watch ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and read ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’”
― 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 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
“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.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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.”
― Naomi Alderman
“The worst things that ever happened to me were before I was 20. It has been slow, hard-won improvement since then.”
― 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’ve got the brain for systems and a head for figures.”
― Naomi Alderman
“I grew up an Orthodox Jew, and now I’m not an Orthodox Jew. So I have sympathy for people who lose their faith.”
― Naomi Alderman
“I am a geek, and proud of it.”
― Naomi Alderman
“There’s some really good stuff in the way I was brought up. There’s some really rubbish stuff as well.”
― Naomi Alderman
“I suppose the idea about all Orthodox religion is that it’s a kind of submission, obedience.”
― Naomi Alderman
“I don’t think I have any particular problem with God.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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
“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.”
― 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
“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.”
― Naomi Alderman
“I was reading the Bible in Hebrew from a very young age, so that’ll shape ideas about how words can move the world.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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.”
― Naomi Alderman
“I’ve always been a reader of science fiction, and I have loved a lot of feminist science fiction.”
― 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
“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
“When I was 19, I wrote a novel, which was not very good, but I finished it.”
― Naomi Alderman
“For years, I looked down on my mother for shopping at Asda, and now I feel very ashamed of it.”
― Naomi Alderman
“I think some people’s brains have more of a natural bent towards God than others.”
― Naomi Alderman
“I have a suspicion of lockstep and everyone looking in the same direction: that’s a key character trait in me.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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
“I got my first library card, for Hendon Library in north London, when I was two years old.”
― Naomi Alderman
“The value of the arts cannot be measured by its ability to preserve life but rather to enhance existence.”
― Naomi Alderman
“Just as readers often turn into writers, novel-writers often become novel-reviewers.”
― 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
“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.”
― Naomi Alderman
“Twitter’s strength – and its weakness – is that it makes it extremely easy to share every passing thought with everyone on your friends list.”
― Naomi Alderman
“What makes ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ so terrifying is that everything that happens in it is plausible.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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
“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
“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.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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
“You learn the most from sitting down and doing the work, regularly, patiently, sometimes in hope, sometimes despairingly.”
― Naomi Alderman
“Writing is investigation.”
― 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
“We all know that the desire for perfection can get in the way of authenticity and enjoyment; it’s the same with games. There’s a completist part to many of us that can’t rest until we reach the perfect 100% finish point.”
― 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
“I wish it were true that every child had access to an education that helped them reach their full potential.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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.”
― Naomi Alderman
“Personal trainers, however nice, give me PE teacher flashbacks.”
― Naomi Alderman
“I’ve been a comics fan since my first hit of those gateway drawings: Judy, Asterix, and the TV cartoon ‘Spider-Man and his Amazing Friend’ – which naturally led me to Spider-Man comics.”
― Naomi Alderman
“I hate to be one of those people who forwards links to ‘hilarious pictures’ or ‘brilliant games’ to half their contacts database.”
― Naomi Alderman
“The hilarity or brilliance of a forwarded link is inversely proportional to the number of people it’s sent to.”
― 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
“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.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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.”
― Naomi Alderman
“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
“I love books. I want to read them, and I want to own them so they’re always available to be reread.”
― Naomi Alderman
“No one should ever feel obliged to speak or to put themselves out publicly online, but I do think it’s a good thing to do. The more of us who are women, making our work and just going ‘Here I am, here’s my work,’ the easier it gets for everybody. It’s a good thing to do.”
― Naomi Alderman
“I have no wish to offend, but I do think that holy cows need challenging.”
― Naomi Alderman
“I like things that take you by the hand and say, ‘You think you know about this – you think you understand it – but there’s so much that you don’t.’”
― 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
“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.”
― Naomi Alderman
“Feminists are asking the practical questions about how you want to live your life.”
― Naomi Alderman
“My childhood was full of shocks and alarums, and I had to work a long time to make a life that pleases me.”
― Naomi Alderman
“Too many keep-fit ideas are designed for those who are already fit, and they’re just no fun.”
― Naomi Alderman
“If you hold strong convictions against gay marriage, you shouldn’t apply for a job as a registrar.”
― Naomi Alderman
“Games don’t cause racism. But the real-time chat makes nasty comments hard to moderate and easy to spread.”
― 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
“If something is a problem, it’s all right to admit it.”
― Naomi Alderman
“The arts are valuable because they increase our sense of what it means to be human, not because of any specific skill or ability they confer.”
― Naomi Alderman
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