Top 200 Lena Dunham Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

156. “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

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

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

161. “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

162. “I think of my body as a tool to do the stuff I need to do, but not the be all end all of my existence.”

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

164. “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

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

— Lena Dunham

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Lena Dunham

169. “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

170. “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

171. “I love flawed female characters, duking it out.”

— Lena Dunham

172. “Even when presented with evidence of my own productivity I think that the people accusing me of being productive don’t know how hard it is for me to just bend my elbow sometimes.”

— Lena Dunham

173. “I started writing plays, but the fact that plays don’t last forever was too much for me to bear.”

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

175. “I’m glad if my work can make a difference.”

— Lena Dunham

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Lena Dunham

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

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

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

198. “Enjoy going through life as yourself.”

— Lena Dunham

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

— Lena Dunham

200. “I feel like a lot of the female relationships I see on TV or in movies are in some way free of the kind of jealousy and anxiety and posturing that has been such a huge part of my female friendships, which I hope lessens a little bit with age.”

— Lena Dunham