Lena Dunham

“I think romantic comedy, when done right, is my favorite genre. It's just a genre that's very human.”

“When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are made up of compartments! You are one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto, what gets done. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve. This is so simple. But I tried so hard to make it complicated.”

“I think if you feel like you were born to write, then you probably were.”

“Positive, healthy, loving relationships in your twenties... I don't know if anyone would disagree with it: I think they're the exception, not the norm. People are either playing house really aggressively because they're scared of what an uncertain time it is, or they're avoiding commitment altogether.”

“I was raised on the Internet.”

“My weight fluctuates depending on my mood and my current devotion to my fitness routine.”

“When I graduated college I had a series of just humiliating jobs that I couldn't believe I was at.”

“You know, I always think of myself as sort of ready for every criticism.”

“I quit acting when I was 11 because I was cast as a bouncing ball in 'Alice in Wonderland,' and I felt slighted and wounded.”

“I'd love to write something for a male protagonist. That's sort of the next frontier for me. I think it'd be really amazing to write the kind of parts that I love for women but for a guy.”

“All adventurous women do.”

“I feel like a lot of the female relationships I see on TV or in movies are in some way free of the kind of jealousy and anxiety and posturing that has been such a huge part of my female friendships, which I hope lessens a little bit with age.”

“I spent all my time on my movies worried that people were eating and that the schedule was being kept, so to have experts in those areas giving me the brain space as a writer and director is huge.”

“I'm always having to be told to brush my hair.”

“I didn't have to wait six years to get my show on the air, worry that someone else had a similar idea, or wait around for notes that took my voice out of the show.”

“No one wants to see a tattoo on a stomach.”

“I love directing scenes that I'm not in because suddenly I really feel like a filmmaker which is a different thing.”

“I do think girls in their twenties accept certain kinds of lesser treatment than they would at other times in their lives.”

“I thought I would marry my boyfriend and grow old and sick of him. I thought I would keep my friends, and we'd make different, new memories. None of that happened. Better things happened. Then why am I so sad?”

“It's very easy for me to say what success is. I think success is connecting with an audience who understands you and having a dialogue with them. I think success is continuing to push yourself forward creatively and not sort of becoming a caricature of yourself.”