"That’s the mistake we all make, isn’t it? Believing that being a writer means being, you know, totally and utterly uninterrupted—it means silence, it means, you know, a room of one’s own."

"No, no. That’s bullshit. That’s what we perceive a male writer to have. And that can lead to horrible solipsism and disconnection from humanity. I’m not naming names, never naming names... Martin Amis, Woody Allen, Saul Bellow."

Lines delivered by Tracey Ullman (as a writer named Ode Montgomery) in the "Painful Evacuation" episode of "Girls." I wish I had video of this scene — a little vignette that precedes the credits. It's all we see of Ullman, but I kept pausing and rewinding and rewatching it bit by bit. I was exclaiming: "This is the best performance I have ever seen on television." The lines were good and Lena Dunham — interviewing Ullman's character — was doing a fine supporting role, but Ullman was so funny (and dramatic) and doing so much in such a short time that I was in total awe.

I cut and pasted the line from a piece in Tablet by Miranda Cooper "On ‘Girls,’ Narcissism and Jewish Writers/Hannah gets some unexpected news, Woody Allen and Saul Bellow get name dropped, and Ray confronts his own mortality."

Excerpt:

What more could a Jewish-American-literature obsessed recapper ask for? Casting aside Amis, a self-professed philosemite, the fact that Montgomery’s list of self-centered writers is all Jewish is like manna from the HBO heavens.

Interestingly, Allen and Bellow have also been often compared to Philip Roth, who held much of last week’s episode’s attention. Allen even had a not-so-subtle cameo in the form of a photo on the wall in fictional writer Chuck Palmer’s study: a brilliant sight gag in an episode about writers abusing their fame and privilege. As with Roth, these are more than casual name drops. Girls is setting up an old guard of male Jewish American writers with whom Hannah must contend. Is being a writer as a woman really as hard as it seems, Hannah asks? Harder, Montgomery confirms.

By the way, if you don't actually watch this show, don't assume you know what it is like. The first 2 episodes of the new season have been phenomenal, and last season was great. Please don't clutter the comments with things you've been repeating about Lena Dunham for years. To do that is to flaunt that you do not know what you are talking about. Anyone who thinks the show is doctrinaire feminism and female narcissism is making it obvious that he doesn't know what he is talking about.