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.

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.

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 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.

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.

It's very easy for a writer to spend much too much time in her head.

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

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

I've been paid less than men I worked with who contributed less to the project.

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.

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.'

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

I've always been a reader of science fiction, and I have loved a lot of feminist science fiction.

When I was 19, I wrote a novel, which was not very good, but I finished it.

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

I think some people's brains have more of a natural bent towards God than others.

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

The value of the arts cannot be measured by its ability to preserve life but rather to enhance existence.

Just as readers often turn into writers, novel-writers often become novel-reviewers.

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

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.

Twitter's strength - and its weakness - is that it makes it extremely easy to share every passing thought with everyone on your friends list.

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.

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.

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

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 wish it were true that every child had access to an education that helped them reach their full potential.

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.

More choice doesn't make us happy, and we understand that no one has infinite choices about how to live life.

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.

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

The hilarity or brilliance of a forwarded link is inversely proportional to the number of people it's sent to.

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.

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.

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.