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.

I love books. I want to read them, and I want to own them so they're always available to be reread.

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.

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

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.'

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.

My childhood was full of shocks and alarums, and I had to work a long time to make a life that pleases me.

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

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

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.