I have a ship's bed, which totally plays to my obsession of, if I were not an actress, I would be a pirate.

The lighthearted moments of 'Girls' are really not speckled throughout and that to me is just super exciting, to be able to delve into the darkness that you are greeted with in your early 20s and the fear and what that makes you do, the places that you can potentially go with that.

People idealize or reminisce about their 20s, but nobody tells you beforehand that it's hard and unglamorous and often very unpleasant.

Give me an 18-hour day on set or in the theater, and I will be the happiest person alive.

I'm a little bit of a weirdo - I'm kind of a loner, I didn't go to college, I spend a lot of my time reading. I've been working since I was 17, so that's sort of been my life.

I went to a strict elementary school with nuns, and uniforms that I'm pretty sure were made out of sandpaper. It was an academic, sports-oriented place. I liked to read, and wanted to act, and didn't try out for volleyball. I was weird. The other girls would dip my hair in ink and stuff.

You can have a laugh in Los Angeles, or you can weep in Los Angeles, depending on your attitude towards it.

The idea of the beauty of diversity came from just growing up where I grew up. Los Angeles is a very big city - there's Little Ethiopia, Little Armenia, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, there's African-Americans, Latinos, Europeans.

We have good food in Los Angeles, but it's not as good as Atlanta food.

I owe my whole acting career to the fact that I'm a singer. I went out to Los Angeles and auditioned for a TV show called 'Fame L.A.' The original role was for a comedian, but they said I wasn't very funny, so they asked me, 'What else can you do?' So I played a singer.

Yeah, I think there are a lot of things about Cleveland that I miss. Los Angeles is a funny place to live.

I attended an evangelical Christian university on the outskirts of suburban Los Angeles and by the time of my graduation was neither evangelical nor Christian.