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

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.

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.

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

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.

If something is a problem, it’s all right to admit it.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

No one in tech has ever been as sexist toward me as teachers and rabbis before I was 12 years old.

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

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.’

Writing is investigation.

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

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.

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

What is freedom, in the end, but that no one cares any longer to try to restrain us?

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

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 was reading the Bible in Hebrew from a very young age, so that’ll shape ideas about how words can move the world.

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.

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.

I got my first library card, for Hendon Library in north London, when I was two years old.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

For years, I looked down on my mother for shopping at Asda, and now I feel very ashamed of it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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’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!

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

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

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

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.

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.

When we learn to TOLERATE boredom, we find out who we really are.

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.

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.

Personal trainers, however nice, give me PE teacher flashbacks.

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

I am a geek, and proud of it.

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