No one in tech has ever been as sexist toward me as teachers and rabbis before I was 12 years old.
I hate to be one of those people who forwards links to 'hilarious pictures' or 'brilliant games' to half their contacts database.
The worst things that ever happened to me were before I was 20. It has been slow, hard-won improvement since then.
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 really hope that men read 'The Power' and watch 'The Handmaid's Tale' and read 'The Handmaid's Tale.'
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 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.'
The politics of fear are always the same. They are easily recognisable in retrospect. They are easy to acquiesce in at the time.
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.
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 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 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've only got anywhere with Minecraft by getting my friends to explain it.
For years, I looked down on my mother for shopping at Asda, and now I feel very ashamed of it.
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 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.
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.
You learn the most from sitting down and doing the work, regularly, patiently, sometimes in hope, sometimes despairingly.
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 love books. I want to read them, and I want to own them so they're always available to be reread.
As a gamer, I can't think of anything more annoying for everyone concerned than playing games in a shared living room.
I hated sports at school. Almost everyone did.
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.
More choice doesn't make us happy, and we understand that no one has infinite choices about how to live life.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 think some people's brains have more of a natural bent towards God than others.
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.
The gaming world isn't filled only with violence and depravity. In fact, it's mostly enchanting.
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.
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 am a geek, and proud of it.
Feminists are asking the practical questions about how you want to live your life.
I've always been a reader of science fiction, and I have loved a lot of feminist science fiction.
In general, I'd rather ask questions and look stupid than keep quiet and not understand what someone's talking about.
Let's teach boys at school the personally and economically valuable skills of self-expression and emotional intelligence, of mediation and problem-solving.
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.
Personal trainers, however nice, give me PE teacher flashbacks.
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 you hold strong convictions against gay marriage, you shouldn't apply for a job as a registrar.
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.
I've got the brain for systems and a head for figures.
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 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.'
I grew up an Orthodox Jew, and now I'm not an Orthodox Jew. So I have sympathy for people who lose their faith.
