Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

Perfect

Always

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

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

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

" 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 am a geek, and proud of it. "

Naomi Alderman

Proud

Geek

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

" 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. "

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

Naomi Alderman

Worst

Improvement

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

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "