Top 200 Lena Dunham Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I’m glad if my work can make a difference.”

— Lena Dunham

152. “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

153. “I’ve always had a talent for recognizing when I am in a moment worth being nostalgic for. When I was little, my mother would come home from a party, her hair cool from the wind, her perfume almost gone, and her lips a faded red, and she would coo at me “You’re still awake! Hiiii.” And I’d think how beautiful she was and how I always wanted to remember her stepping out of the elevator in her pea-green wool coat, thirty-nine years old, just like that.”

— Lena Dunham

154. “This is our hobby, appropriating meaningful artifacts and displaying them as evidence of who we will never be.”

— Lena Dunham

155. “I think if you feel like you were born to write, then you probably were.”

— Lena Dunham

156. “The parts I enjoy playing aren’t really available to me. So I have to write them.”

— Lena Dunham

157. “I know that when I am dying, looking back, it will be women that I regret having argued with, women I sought to impress, to understand, was tortured by. Women I wish to see again, to see them smile and laugh and say, It was all as it should have been.”

— Lena Dunham

158. “I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.”

— Lena Dunham

159. “I’ve always had a talent for recognizing when I am in a moment worth being nostalgic for.”

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

162. “I don’t want to get married until all gay people can get married.”

— Lena Dunham

163. “I’m just waiting to be 85 and be in a pajama community. Everyone’s welcome to join me.”

— Lena Dunham

164. “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

165. “You will find,” she says, “that there’s a certain grace to having your heart broken.”

— Lena Dunham

166. “It’s a little too cold to be outside and we wear our sunglasses, shrinking down into our hoodies. I pick at my pancakes while she tells me, simply, “It’s okay to change your mind.” About a feeling, a person, a promise of love. I can’t stay just to avoid contradicting myself. I don’t have to watch him cry.”

— Lena Dunham

167. “I’ve never thought of myself as an actor, so somebody recognizing me for that would be a real shock.”

— Lena Dunham

168. “It doesn’t occur to so many people that if you don’t have a clear heterosexual, gender confirming identity that there are parts of day-to-day life – like using a bathroom or getting your clothes – that just aren’t going to be as easy.”

— Lena Dunham

169. “I always imagined that having a baby is something that I’m going to keep in a private place, but maybe my curse is that all I’m going to want to do is tell everybody about what my birth process was like and what my children’s nightmares are.”

— Lena Dunham

170. “You’ve learned a new rule and it’s simple: don’t put yourself in situations you’d like to run away from.”

— Lena Dunham

171. “After several interactions in which he questioned my authority and pretended not to hear me speaking, it was clear he was my type.”

— Lena Dunham

172. “I know he loves talking about death. It just takes him a second to get warmed up. “You know,” he says. “It just can’t be a bad thing. Because it’s everything.”

— Lena Dunham

173. “I can feel them. The babies. They’re not crawling all over me. They’re not vomiting in my hair or shrieking. They’re doing perfectly normal baby things, and I’m keeping them alive. But I resent them. Their constancy, their intrusion on my relationship and my free time and my naps and my imagination and my heart. They’ve come too soon, and I can’t do any of what I had planned. All I can do is survive.”

— Lena Dunham

174. “I’m really lucky because my sister is a real activist soul and also hyper-intellectualized in this way that’s really allowed me to wrap my mind around some of the bigger intellectual concepts and really understand the language around identity in the gender nonconforming community.”

— Lena Dunham

175. “I feel like I don’t watch that many shows with death.”

— Lena Dunham

176. “When it’s low-budget, and you have one other person on the set, you have to make rules.”

— Lena Dunham

177. “Youth, with all its accompanying risks, humiliations, and uncertainties, the pressure to do it all before it’s too late.”

— Lena Dunham

178. “Enjoy going through life as yourself.”

— Lena Dunham

179. “I felt like my parents were always involved with abstraction, and I wanted to do something very specific.”

— Lena Dunham

180. “It is really funny how even cool chicks are sort of like, ‘Our moms covered that feminism thing and now we’re living in a post-that world,’ when that just isn’t true.”

— Lena Dunham

181. “I am comforted by the fact that I find a real range of female bodies beautiful, and I hope that other people do too. And even if they don’t find it beautiful I hope they’re just glad that something like it is happening on TV.”

— Lena Dunham

182. “The male capacity for turning the negative into a compliment is really alarming.”

— Lena Dunham

183. “It’s really hard to grow with another person.”

— Lena Dunham

184. “When I graduated college I had a series of just humiliating jobs that I couldn’t believe I was at.”

— Lena Dunham

185. “I know that when I am dying, looking back, it will be women that I regret having argued with, women I sought to impress, to understand...”

— Lena Dunham

186. “My relationship to eating, my relationship to critiquing my own shape, all of that has changed since I’ve started viewing my body much more as a tool to do my work.”

— Lena Dunham

187. “I find it really awkward to do a scene where I’m supposed to seem like I’m in love.”

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

189. “I spent all my time on my movies worried that people were eating and that the schedule was being kept, so to have experts in those areas giving me the brain space as a writer and director is huge.”

— Lena Dunham

190. “I’d love to write something for a male protagonist. That’s sort of the next frontier for me. I think it’d be really amazing to write the kind of parts that I love for women but for a guy.”

— Lena Dunham

191. “I didn’t know why this was happening. The cruel reality of anxiety is that you never quite do. At the moments it should logically strike, I am fit as a fiddle. On a lazy afternoon, I am seized by a cold dread.”

— Lena Dunham

192. “Katherine Heiny’s work does something magical: elevates the mundane so that it has the stakes of a mystery novel, gives women’s interior lives the gravity they so richly deserve – and makes you laugh along the way.”

— Lena Dunham

193. “But I want to tell my stories, more than that, I have to in order to stay sane.”

— Lena Dunham

194. “I had no friends. I worried a lot.”

— Lena Dunham

195. “I think romantic comedy, when done right, is my favorite genre. It’s just a genre that’s very human.”

— Lena Dunham

196. “When I write I’m never really thinking about themes or the universal.”

— Lena Dunham

197. “As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter.”

— Lena Dunham

198. “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

199. “I felt highly anxious in a way that I didn’t think other children were.”

— Lena Dunham

200. “Over time, my belief in many things has wavered: marriage, the afterlife, Woody Allen.”

— Lena Dunham