I listen to terrible music when exercising. I mean, like, early Madonna, Boney M, the Fratellis, Shakira... I can't claim interesting musical taste.

Feminists are asking the practical questions about how you want to live your life.

I honestly can't think of many more truly romantic gestures than a really well-thought-through prenuptial agreement.

Claude Cahun is a fascinating artist - one of the few women to be part of the surrealist movement, she and her partner Suzanne Malherbe took on men's names and made artworks that investigated female identity long before 'The Second Sex' or Cindy Sherman.

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.

Let's teach boys at school the personally and economically valuable skills of self-expression and emotional intelligence, of mediation and problem-solving.

Personal trainers, however nice, give me PE teacher flashbacks.

Attending a book group is always a salutary experience for a writer. There's no guarantee that the people there will have enjoyed your book, and, as anyone who has taken part in a book group will know, half the fun is in ripping a book you haven't liked to shreds.

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 really hope that men read 'The Power' and watch 'The Handmaid's Tale' and read 'The Handmaid's Tale.'

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.

I am someone who really would like to see more women in government, but Palin makes me cringe every time I hear about her.

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.

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.

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.

No human quality belongs to only one class of person. We all get to be both aggressive and loving. We all get to delight in our careers and revel in our children. We're all kind and brave, soft and hard, sciency and artsy, interested in being looked at and in admiring others' physical form. Everything.

The politics of fear are always the same. They are easily recognisable in retrospect. They are easy to acquiesce in at the time.

The gaming world isn't filled only with violence and depravity. In fact, it's mostly enchanting.

I am a fairly mongrelized person - you know I've been a migrant my whole life, and it's hard to think of myself as any pure one thing. And so I take it, I guess, very personally - this notion that migrants are bad and that mixing is bad and that people from other places are bad.

It's not that, living in Pakistan, I feel an enormous constraint on how I can write and what I can say; rather, I recognize that one has to navigate these things... Am I aware of things that one could say that would be risky or that could be dangerous? Certainly I'm aware of those things.

In a sense, by closing off the idea that young Muslims, and particularly young Muslim men, can be American heroes, it increases the chance that they'll try to be some other kind of hero. And that, I think, is entirely counterproductive.

Outside of America, there are many people, myself included, who champion values that in some senses could be thought of as traditionally American: The idea that everybody is equal; the idea that the rights of women and men should be the same.

I think that when we take the long view, the notion that some people are deemed less worthy of being able to move - to not have the right to cross borders - over time, that's going to seem as outmoded and as unfair, really, as racial discrimination or other kinds of discrimination.

We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.