Top 200 Lena Dunham Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I was being desexualized in slow motion, becoming a teddy bear with breasts.”

— Lena Dunham

52. “Once, my little sister was walking down the street in her thick black glasses, and a homeless man muttered, Talk nerdy to me.”

— Lena Dunham

53. “No one wants to see a tattoo on a stomach.”

— Lena Dunham

54. “I deserved kisses. I deserved to be treated like a piece of meat but also respected for my intellect.”

— Lena Dunham

55. “But I also think when we embark on intimate relationships, we make a basic human promise to be decent, to hold a flattering mirror up to each other, to be respectful as we explore each other.”

— Lena Dunham

56. “Guys warning girls not to fall in love with them is so truly douchey that it should have a higher success rate.”

— Lena Dunham

57. “I’ve never seen Star Wars or The Godfather, so that would be a good excuse for us to spend a bunch of time together.”

— Lena Dunham

58. “You have to move so you don’t die. You have to move so your brain doesn’t atrophy. You have to move so that you look a little bit like a person that you might want to be. There are a thousand reasons why exercise is important, and I’ve had to find ways to make it sexy for myself.”

— Lena Dunham

59. “We both followed our hearts and had no choice but to hurt each other deeply.”

— Lena Dunham

60. “Luxury is nice, but creativity is nicer.”

— Lena Dunham

61. “I can’t wait to be eighty. So I can shock people by saying “rim job” in casual conversation.”

— Lena Dunham

62. “I always say that I can play sort of six variations on one girl, all of whom are a variation on me. Maybe I’ll think of myself as an actor if, like, I do a corset drama.”

— Lena Dunham

63. “Hell hath no fury like a woman who has accidentally napped.”

— Lena Dunham

64. “At my age, no one is married, no one has kids, no one has a career.”

— Lena Dunham

65. “Life is long, people change, I would never be foolish enough to think otherwise. But no matter what, nothing can ever be as it was. Everything has changed in a way that sounds trite and borderline offensive when recounted over coffee. I can never be who I was. I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding, and some measure of awe.”

— Lena Dunham

66. “The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action. It makes me want to take a nap.”

— Lena Dunham

67. “My shape reminds me a lot of my grandmother, whom I was really close to. She died when I was 13, and we have a really similar body type, the squat New England woman who can roll out dough and bring in your lawnmower. That’s kind of the vibe of my body, and I’m into it.”

— Lena Dunham

68. “I think that people in the phase between being someone’s kid and being someone’s parent have always been uniquely narcissistic, but that social media and Twitter and LiveJournal make it really easy to navel-gaze in a way that you’ve never been able to before.”

— Lena Dunham

69. “My uncle’s a lawyer and I remember going to see him in court and thinking, ‘That’s cool, too bad I could never be a lawyer.’”

— Lena Dunham

70. “I always thought the saddest feeling in life is when you’re dancing in a really joyful way and then you hit your head on something.”

— Lena Dunham

71. “It’s interesting how we often can’t see the ways in which we are being strong – like, you can’t be aware of what you’re doing that’s tough and brave at the time that you’re doing it because if you knew that it was brave, then you’d be scared.”

— Lena Dunham

72. “I went to an amazing school in Brooklyn called St. Anne’s that’s a really kind of creative hot bed.”

— Lena Dunham

73. “When I was nine, I wrote a vow of celibacy on a piece of paper and ate it.”

— Lena Dunham

74. “Confidence lets you pull anything off, even Tevas with socks.”

— Lena Dunham

75. “And one day you’ll get out of bed to pee, and someone will say, “I hate it when you leave” and you will WANT to rush back. You’ll think, stuff like this only happens to characters played by Jennifer Garner, right? but it’s happening to you and it keeps happening even when you cry or misbehave or show him how terrible you are at planning festive group outings. He seems to be there without reservation. He pays attention. He listens. He seems to want to stay.”

— Lena Dunham

76. “It’s very easy for me to say what success is. I think success is connecting with an audience who understands you and having a dialogue with them. I think success is continuing to push yourself forward creatively and not sort of becoming a caricature of yourself.”

— Lena Dunham

77. “Women saying “I’m not a feminist” is my greatest pet peeve. Do you believe that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs? Do you believe that women should be allowed to leave the house? Do you think that women and men both deserve equal rights? Great, then you’re a feminist.”

— Lena Dunham

78. “The way in which you share your body must be a CHOICE. Support these women and do not look at these pictures.”

— Lena Dunham

79. “I am thinking particularly of a shower I took where the lower half of my body was under the running water and the upper half was laid out on the bath mat, eating a loaf of bread.”

— Lena Dunham

80. “I never sort of thought of myself as a comedy writer, by nature.”

— Lena Dunham

81. “I consider being female such a unique gift, such a sacred joy, in ways that run so deep I can’t articulate them. It’s a special kind of privilege to be born into the body you wanted, to embrace the essence of your gender even as you recognize what you are up against. Even as you seek to redefine it.”

— Lena Dunham

82. “My weight fluctuates depending on my mood and my current devotion to my fitness routine.”

— Lena Dunham

83. “But that’s how I felt in high school, sure that my people were from elsewhere, and going elsewhere, and that they would recognise me when they saw me. They would like me enough that it wouldn’t matter if I liked myself. They would see the good in me so that I could, too.”

— Lena Dunham

84. “I’ve been a little haphazard about how nude I get, and the only thing that keeps me from getting anxious about it is that I’ve had complete control over it.”

— Lena Dunham

85. “I can play very annoying girl, very lost girl and then all the things in the spectrum between.”

— Lena Dunham

86. “The people accusing me of being productive don’t know how hard it is for me to just bend my elbow sometimes.”

— Lena Dunham

87. “Let this book take you to the stars and beyond.”

— Lena Dunham

88. “I’m not super thin, but I’m thin, for like, Detroit.”

— Lena Dunham

89. “And I decided then that I will never be jealous. I will never be vengeful. I won’t be threatened by the old, or by the new. I’ll open wide like a daisy every morning. I will make my work.”

— Lena Dunham

90. “Soon you will find yourself in more and more situations you don’t want to run from. At work you’ll realize that you’ve spent the entire day in your body, really in it, not imagining what you look like to the people who surround you but just being who you are. You are a tool being put to its proper use. That changes a lot of things.”

— Lena Dunham

91. “I learned that people are much more game to mock their own personas than you would think.”

— Lena Dunham

92. “I have been envious of male characteristics, if not the men themselves. I’m jealous of the ease with which they seem to inhabit their professional pursuits: the lack of apologizing, of bending over backward to make sure the people around them are comfortable with what they’re trying to do. The fact that they are so often free of the people-pleasing instincts I have considered to be a curse of my female existence.”

— Lena Dunham

93. “If you have a bad feeling about someone, don’t worry about offending them. Just run. Being polite is how you get your purse stolen or your “purse stolen.”

— Lena Dunham

94. “I always reminded myself that this wasn’t exactly where I was meant to be, but pit stops are okay on the road of life, aren’t they?”

— Lena Dunham

95. “I feel like there are fifty ways it’s my fault. I fantasized. I took the big pill and the small pill, stuffed myself with substances to make being out in the world with people my own age a little easier. To lessen the space between me and everyone else. I was hungry to be seen. But I also know that at no moment did I consent to being handled that way.”

— Lena Dunham

96. “A night of carousing never passed without me stepping outside the experience to think, Yes, this must be what it is to be young.”

— Lena Dunham

97. “I love directing scenes that I’m not in because suddenly I really feel like a filmmaker which is a different thing.”

— Lena Dunham

98. “I always thought that if you had any real proximity to famous people, that your obsession with famous people, would wane is some way. Like, I wouldn’t want to deep google Matthew McConaughey’s early relationships for hours before I go to bed. And it’s just gotten worse.”

— Lena Dunham

99. “The way I saw it, I was fully capable of being treated with indifference that bordered on disdain while maintaining a strong sense of self-respect. But that isn’t how it works. When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself.”

— Lena Dunham

100. “It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself, a feeling that I believe, next to extreme nausea sans vomiting, is the depth of human misery.”

— Lena Dunham