Notable Lines from the New York Times Magazine Profile of Lena Dunham

A few notable lines from the New York Times Magazine profile of Lena Dunham:

(Emphasis ours.)

At 28, Dunham may be entering the pantheon of gurus a bit prematurely, though in fairness, her life so far has been nothing if not examined.

(Lena Dunham is a guru.)

To suggest that Dunham is too young, too privileged, too entitled, too narcissistic, neurotic and provincial (in that rarefied Manhattan-raised way) to be dispensing advice to anyone is to add very little to the ever-expanding, very much already-in-progress conversation about her place in the culture and her overall right to exist.

(Let’s not mention how privileged she is because everyone has already mentioned it. Oh, wait — by mentioning how we’re not going to mention it did we just mention it?)

It’s entirely possible that she’s an icon precisely because she doesn’t speak for anyone else, because she has the exceedingly rare ability to be 100 percent herself, 100 percent of the time — or at least to come off that way.

(It is rare to find people who are really real. Rare!)

She is perhaps to the millennials what J. D. Salinger was to the post-World War II generation and Woody Allen was to the baby boomers: a singular voice who spoke as an outsider and, in so doing, became the ultimate insider.

(Girls is Catcher In The Rye.)

Dunham says the worst Internet-related experience of her career came in December 2012, when Gawker got hold of her book proposal and posted all 66 pages of it.

“They posted it with a list of 72 reasons I was the dumbest human on earth,” she recalls. (There was no such list, but to her there might as well have been.)

Cough.

Her mainstream success aside, she is not a mainstream artist. Which is really to say that she is an artist, a traditional auteur whose body of work, like it or not, probably already contains some classics.