Lena Dunham Quotes

For anyone that has ever done a sex scene, it takes on the feeling of learning a ridiculous dance, like the electric slide. It's not a sexy experience.

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.

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.

You don't need to be flamboyant in your life to be flamboyant in your work.

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.

Survivors are so often re-victimized by a system that demands they prove their purity and innocence.

We're living in a world where [Judy Blume] books were ever banned, and now like "Fifty Shades of Grey" is being read in high schools. Like it's just a wild.

It's a very specific body. Even great reviews will be like: chubby, portly, overweight. . . . Sometimes I'm like, 'Ugh, how did I make myself the guinea pig for this?' But on the other hand, hating my body has not been my cross to bear in this life. Which I feel very lucky about.

You’ve learned a new rule and it’s simple: don’t put yourself in situations you’d like to run away from. But when you run, run back to yourself, like that bunny in Runaway Bunny runs to its mother, but you are the mother and you’ll see that later and be very, very proud.

Aren't most of us dealing with the fact that we have moms who either weren't ready to be moms or had some level of resentment about it? Everybody is dealing with the different iteration of pain their mom has handed them.

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

The experience of directing yourself in a sex scene is, in a way, great. It's the fantasy we all have in our lives all the time.

My mom said the term heavy petting existed a lot when she was in high school.

I have to take my shoes off, you guys.

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.

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.

Things that feel super personal actually feel really universal. It's sort of the more you really identify something specific within yourself, the more people connect to it because ultimately we are all connected in some way.

It's not brave to do something that doesn't scare you.

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

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.

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

I think about my best friendship - which the Marnie-Hannah friendship in Girls is based on - as like a great romance of my young life.

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.

Feminism and issues surrounding being female in the world, always, but particularly right now at this complicated cultural moment. It's a huge part of what's important to me.

I value my health and my happiness. And I've realized exercise can give me both of those things.

I feel like so much more than my gender and so much more than my relationship to my body and my relationship to men. And, but suddenly you're sort of asked to be an expert.

The biggest fear that everybody has is dying. Not to get too meta on you, but I think every fear that people are trying to work out is really like I'm going to die and no one is going to care, and it doesn't matter because God might not exist. That's what people are trying to figure out. I wish we all had one fear so we could think about it together and figure out a solution, but we're all doing different things.

You just have to work, we all have to work really hard to take care of ourselves and feed ourselves good information, just like we feed ourselves good food. Feed ourselves good books and good messaging and the things that make us feel like we can be connected with ourselves and others in a deeper way.

I actually didn't enjoy being a child particularly at all even though I had nice parents in a comfortable place to live. Just because I was too confused in generating too many answers for myself that just scared me more.

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.

I think women are conditioned to stand by their man and watch them make it to the top, but most men never believe the person they get into a relationship with is going to rise any higher than she was when they met. It takes a very special, evolved person to be able to deal with change within a relationship.

I don't want to get married until all gay people can get married.

It’s interesting to see how other people react to an oversharer.

I've always loved my own little office spaces no matter what they were like. It's the Virginia Woolf, room of one's own concept, it's really important.

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.'

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

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. People taking pictures of what they eat and showing them on their Facebook. People assume that people have a level of interest in what they're doing that's maybe far greater than it is, although there is an audience for all that stuff.

I feel prettier with a naked face and ChapStick. But a good haircut makes a huge difference.

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

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.

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

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.

Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying.

I'm glad if my work can make a difference.

I find it really awkward to do a scene where I'm supposed to seem like I'm in love.

I’m not super thin, but I’m thin, for like, Detroit

It was only when I started making short films in college and I was looking for girls to play the me-ish parts that I thought, Well, maybe I'm just going to try doing this myself before somebody else comes in and handles it. For a long time my acting was just a marriage of convenience between me and these characters that I was writing.

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