Top 200 Lena Dunham Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “You can’t give any exciting speech without misremembering things.”

— Lena Dunham

103. “You know, when I first started making online videos, there were a lot of filmmakers I befriended who were doing it too.”

— Lena Dunham

104. “I didn’t have to wait six years to get my show on the air, worry that someone else had a similar idea, or wait around for notes that took my voice out of the show.”

— Lena Dunham

105. “None of my actions have ever sort of been motored by the search for a husband or wondering if I was going to have a family someday or wanting to live in a really great house or thinking it would be really great to have a diamond.”

— Lena Dunham

106. “It’s funny, I never considered that people are going to see me on the show and maybe stop me on the subway.”

— Lena Dunham

107. “I have to take my shoes off, you guys.”

— Lena Dunham

108. “People are ultimately threatened by young people taking positions of power.”

— Lena Dunham

109. “My dad finds Twitter just infinitely unrelatable. He’s like, ‘Why would I want to tell anybody what I had for a snack, it’s private?!’ And I’m like, ‘Why would you even have a snack if you didn’t tell anybody? Why bother eating?’”

— Lena Dunham

110. “Barbie’s disfigured. It’s fine to play with her just as long as you keep that in mind.”

— Lena Dunham

111. “I sometimes want to make a book of every tattoo I wanted to get before I actually got a tattoo, because there were so many awful ideas and concepts.”

— Lena Dunham

112. “On a personal level, I’m proud of Grace Dunham for being so staunchly in her identity. It’s a very unusual thing for a young person. I think she’s been very strong about it.”

— Lena Dunham

Featured in: Strong Quotes

113. “I’ve never wanted to be with women so much as I wanted to be them: there are women whose career arc excites me, whose ease of expression is impressive, whose mastery of party banter has bee simultaneously hostile and rapt.”

— Lena Dunham

114. “I wanted to be a poet. I had a really romantic idea about what that would mean. My parents knew some poets, and I liked how they dressed and acted, but I didn’t really acknowledge that I only liked reading some bits of poetry while I was peeing or something.”

— Lena Dunham

Featured in: Reading Quotes

115. “I didn’t drink in the essence of the classroom. I didn’t take legible notes or dance all night. I thought I would marry my boyfriend and grow old and sick of him. I thought I would keep my friends, and we’d make different, new memories. None of that happened. Better things happened.”

— Lena Dunham

116. “I should do the things that make me feel cool and smart. As I get older, I’m realizing more and more that it doesn’t really matter if I’m good at it, it just matters that I try. My own effort, my own willingness, are becoming what’s appealing to me.”

— Lena Dunham

117. “I miss her the way I missed our loft after we moved in seventh grade: sharply, and then not at all. There is too much unpacking to do.”

— Lena Dunham

118. “But surveying those words I realized they are mine. He is mine to protect. There is so much I’ve shared, and so much that’s been crushed by the sharing. I never mourned it, because it never mattered.”

— Lena Dunham

119. “I have only the vaguest memory of a life before fear. Every morning when I wake up there is one blissful second before I took around the room and remember my daily terrors.”

— Lena Dunham

120. “Hugs feel good even when they come from strangers. Ergo, we should all be hugging more.”

— Lena Dunham

121. “She has a taste for unusual women, with strong noses and doll eyes and creative dispositions.”

— Lena Dunham

122. “For me, my life goal is to be in a position where I can wear pajamas 24 hours a day. That’s what makes me happy.”

— Lena Dunham

123. “Drunk emotions aren’t real emotions.”

— Lena Dunham

124. “Girls are trained to say, ‘I wrote this, but it’s probably really stupid.’ Well, no, you wouldn’t write a novel if you thought it was really stupid. Men are much more comfortable going, ‘I wrote this book because I have a unique perspective that the world needs to hear.’ Girls are taught from the age of seven that if you get a compliment, you don’t go, ‘Thank you’, you go, ‘No, you’re insane.”

— Lena Dunham

125. “Later in the summer your grandfather dies, and you’re secretly glad. You have a place to put all your sorrow now, one that people will understand.”

— Lena Dunham

126. “When she writes, which isn’t often, I get insanely jealous of the way her mind works, the fact that she seems to create for her own pleasure and not to make herself known.”

— Lena Dunham

127. “My mom knows pretty well how I see her.”

— Lena Dunham

128. “I’d always loved movies, but it wasn’t some sort of desperate love of celluloid. It was literally like, “I want to write things, and I want people to see them more.””

— Lena Dunham

129. “What a goon. He’s lucky to know you, but too stupid to ever realize it.”

— Lena Dunham

130. “I think about death, when I lie in bed and imagine disintegrating, my skin going leathery and my hair petrifying and a tree growing out of my stomach, it’s a way to avoid what’s right in front of me. It’s a way to not be here, in the uncertainty of right now.”

— Lena Dunham

131. “I do think girls in their twenties accept certain kinds of lesser treatment than they would at other times in their lives.”

— Lena Dunham

132. “If you’re writing, you’re starting in private. It can really be this amazing, private, freeing experience. Forget that it’s for other people – that comes in later.”

— Lena Dunham

133. “The anxiety that has followed me through my life like a bad friend had reappeared with a vengeance and taken a brand-new form... I didn’t know why this was happening. The cruel reality of anxiety is that you never quite do.”

— Lena Dunham

134. “I thought I wanted to be a journalist or a novelist.”

— Lena Dunham

135. “Remember when you discovered your father owned a book called “How To Disappear and Never Be Found?” You’re sure it was just research for new and creative ways of thinking, for concepts that might apply to his work, but it raised the distinct possibility that there is something very upsetting that people you love could do instead of dying.”

— Lena Dunham

136. “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

137. “If you watch my movie, you understand I am perverse and weird and angry and not looking to direct a film that ends with a bunch of teenagers exploding into glitter.”

— Lena Dunham

138. “It would probably be too easy a cop out to say that just Republican males hate me. Though there’s a large swath of them, for sure.”

— Lena Dunham

139. “Why spend $200 once a week on therapy when you can spend $150 once a year on a psychic?”

— Lena Dunham

140. “The work that’s interesting to me in other people is really confessional.”

— Lena Dunham

141. “I was reminded again that there are so many things we need that can also hurt us: cars, knives, grown-ups.”

— Lena Dunham

142. “Things I’ve learned from my mother: Luxury is nice, but creativity is nicer.”

— Lena Dunham

143. “There are so many reactions to art that make sense to me – but ‘ick’ means something.”

— Lena Dunham

144. “After all, desire is the enemy of contentment.”

— Lena Dunham

145. “I especially like it when a guy starts out rude, explains that it’s a defense mechanism, and then turns even ruder once I get to know him.”

— Lena Dunham

146. “I went to schools that were small enough that basically everyone was in a play. I played a bouncing ball in a production of Alice in Wonderland and a fat man in an Italian commedia dell’arte play. I was given some small chances.”

— Lena Dunham

147. “Is what’s manifesting as a fear actually some instinct to resist being young? Youth, with all its accompanying risks, humiliations, and uncertainties, the pressure to do it all before it’s too late. Is the sense of imminent death bound up in the desire to leave some kind of a legacy?”

— Lena Dunham

148. “I quit acting when I was 11 because I was cast as a bouncing ball in ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ and I felt slighted and wounded.”

— Lena Dunham

149. “I think breakfast is the one meal when you don’t have to eat animal, maybe.”

— Lena Dunham

150. “There’s always an article coming out, saying, ‘The new thing is funny women!’”

— Lena Dunham