"Full disclosure: Lena is one of my best friends, but this was a film that I latched onto and loved long before I even met her. I see it as The Graduate for my generation of girls. The first time I watched it, I felt so dragged and so seen, as though my post-collegiate neuroses were just laid bare and my illogical chaotic feminine misbehavior just strung up for everybody to see. Dead-end jobs, complicated mother-daughter relationships, complicated sister-sister relationships: Dunham explores these things with a mix of levity and fearless vulgarity that makes her work feel so true and so to the gut."

"One of my favorite films is the movie Tootsie. I really love Tootsie. I just watched it when I was a kid and for some reason, I just, I’m obsessed with that movie. I think I’ve watched it 100 times. It’s just so funny and fun, and I love it. It’s cool. I like that it’s sort of about women, you know? It’s sort of about how he finds the woman inside himself, so there’s sort of like this feminine aspect to it, and I just love Dustin Hoffman. He’s amazing. I don’t know, I just love that movie. It’s emotionally totally satisfying to me, and it sort of makes me feel good while being interesting and smart."

"The whole range of arguments in that book is quite radical and complex and beautiful. It’s the first book I’ve read by an author, masculine or feminine, that has a defiance of the situation, which is deeply subversive in the holy sense – it’s other-worldly. She says that this world is stained by human misconception, that men and women have wrong ideas – even if they are ten million years old and come from the mouth of god, they are still wrong! The position in that book is so defiant and passionate that she creates another reality and just might be able to manifest it. It’s from that kind of appetite, with the way things are that new worlds arise, so I have deep admiration for Andrea Dworkin."