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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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

Writing is investigation.

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

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

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!

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

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.

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 am a geek, and proud of it.

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.

If you hold strong convictions against gay marriage, you shouldn't apply for a job as a registrar.

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

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

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.

I hated sports at school. Almost everyone did.

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

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.