I'm not a cinephile. My films don't reference films. I'm more interested in rhythm and feeling.

All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.

Very few women have become famous for being who they actually are, nuanced and imperfect. When honesty happens, it's usually couched in self-ridicule or self-help. Dunham doesn't apologize like that-she simply tells her story as if it might be interesting. The result is shocking and radical because it is utterly familiar. Not That Kind of Girl is hilarious, artful, and staggeringly intimate; I read it shivering with recognition.

I eat an egg every morning, and when I'm done, I almost always have the thought: There. Now even if I'm captured and starved, I'll be able to live off the protein of that egg for a while.

To get anything done, you used to have to brush past, or at least lay eyes on, someone whose reality was totally different from your own. That used to be inevitable. If that goes away because everything's so convenient, everything's brought to you, well, then there goes one of my favorite parts of life, and something that I've gone out of my way to court.

Well,I have a theory that men don't actually cry less than women,they just do it differently. Since we never saw our fathers cry,we are forced to invent our own unique method.

So the recordings were these immersive landscapes, and yet, unlike the performances that almost no one would see, I had a sense that these could live forever. I was just starting to get my head around the democratic aspect of art; I didn't want to make rarefied things that were either alienatingly obscure or elite and art-worldy, so a recording that anyone could buy was a great medium.