Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women's lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable.
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.
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.
I listen to terrible music when exercising. I mean, like, early Madonna, Boney M, the Fratellis, Shakira... I can't claim interesting musical taste.
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.
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.
Let's teach boys at school the personally and economically valuable skills of self-expression and emotional intelligence, of mediation and problem-solving.
Our body is there right now. You did not have to earn a thing. It is a gift. You are a hero every time you step out of your front door to do some exercise.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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'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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'