Lena Dunham Quotes

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.

I would rather spend my entire life doing nothing than have my name attached to something mediocre.

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

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.

I am sorry (not to you but in a deeper way, sorry for my brain chemistry and who I am.

I sort of tend to equate tattoos with prisoners, punks or people with a high level of self-confidence. I don't necessarily have a covered-in-tattoos personality.

But ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put.

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. Then why am I so sad?

I look all right. I look like myself.

Women want to control other women because they've been controlled themselves. It's a cycle of control. I'm not blaming women for that, but I am saying we're part of a toxic culture that's feeding all of us the same messaging.

Here's who it's not okay to share a bed with: Anyone who makes you feel like you're invading their space. Anyone who tells you that they "just can't be alone right now." Anyone who doesn't make you feel like sharing a bed is the coziest and most sensual activity they could possibly be undertaking (unless, of course, it is one of the aforementioned relatives; in that case, they should act lovingly but also reserved/slightly annoyed). Now, look over at the person beside you. Do they meet these criteria? If not, remove them or remove yourself. You're better off alone.

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

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.

All my freakouts have been pretty private and directed at family pets and/or people I have been dating for too short a time to freak out at in that way.

At a brunch potluck, I realize that I do, in fact, hate everybody.

I tell Jack by accident. We're talking on the phone about unprotected sex, how it isn't good for people with our particular temperament, our anxiety like an incorrigible weed. He asks if I've had any sex that was "really stressful," and out the story comes, before I can even consider how to share it. Jack is upset. Angry, though not at me. I'm crying, even though I don't want to. It's not cathartic, or helping me prove my point. I still make joke after joke, but my tears are betraying me, making me appear clear about my pain when I'm not. Jack is in Belgium. It's late there, he's so tired, and I'd rather not be having this conversation this way. "It isn't your fault," he tells me, thinking it's what I need to hear. "There's no version of this where it's your fault." 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 bit 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. I never gave him permission to be rough, to stick himself inside me without a barrier between us. I never gave him permission. In my deepest self I know this, and the knowledge of it has kept me from sinking. I curl up against the wall, wishing I hadn't told him. "I love you so much," he says. "I'm so sorry that happened." Then his voice changes, from pity to som

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.

My mother and I are in the worst fight we've ever had, one that tests the concept of unconditional love, not to mention basic human decency. And the thing is, no one is right exactly. We both followed our hearts and had no choice but to hurt each other deeply.

Getting naked feels better some days than others. (Good: when you are vaguely tan. Bad: when you have diarrhea.)

Barbie's disfigured. It's fine to play with her just as long as you keep that in mind.

My distaste for computers has an almost-political fervor: they're changing our society, I say, and for the worse. Let's act human. Converse. Use our handwriting. I

I feel like I don't watch that many shows with death.

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

When I'm playing a character, I am never allowed to explicitly state the the takeaway message of the scenes I'm performing - after all, part of the dramatic conflict is that the person I'm portraying doesn't really know it yet.

Each corner is a memory. In that way, it's just like every town.

I couldn't always remember his face, so my visual for him became my feet, bare and pale and pressed against the wall as we talked for hours.

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

There are so many reactions to art that make sense to me - but 'ick' means something.

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.

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.

My thoughts on body image are simple: if you are being kind to yourself mentally and physically you never have anything to be ashamed for, ever.

I just don't want to be around people who don't hate everything in their life right now.

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.

Trading sandy tubes of lip gloss and glow-in-the-dark barrettes.

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.

AMFYOYO - an acronym for "adios motherfucker, you're on your own

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.

There's people who don't want to see bodies like mine or bodies like their own bodies.

In my deepest self I know this, and the knowledge has kept me from sinking.

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.

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.

It's become horribly and offensively popular to say that someone is on the autism spectrum, so all I'll say is his inability to notice when I was crying had to be some kind of pathology.

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.

I was raised on the Internet.

Every time I start feeling sexy I trip.

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

There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman.

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

I've made two short films, both of which my father deemed "interesting but beside the point," and am so paralyzed as a writer that I've started translating poems from languages I don't speak, some kind of Surrealist exercise meant to inspire me but also prevent me from thinking the perverse, looping thoughts that come unbidden: I am hideous.

There's always an article coming out, saying, 'The new thing is funny women!'

This, I remember thinking, is the end. Nothing had ever ended before.

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

We took a hike in Malibu and shared ice cream. I stayed with him while he had walking pneumonia, heating soup and pouring him glass after glass of ginger ale and feeling his fevered forehead as he slept. He warned me of the life that was coming for me if I wasn't careful. Success was a scary thing for a young person, he said. I was twenty-four and he was thirty-three ("Jesus's age," he reminded me more than a few times). There was something tender about him, broken and gentle, and I could imagine that sex with him might be similar. I wouldn't have to pretend like I did with other guys. Maybe we would both cry. Maybe it would feel just as good as sharing a bed. On Valentine's Day, I put on lace underwear and begged him to please, finally, have sex with me. The litany of excuses he presented in response was comic in its tragedy: "I want to get to know you." "I don't have a condom." "I'm scared, because I just like you too much." He took an Ambien and fell asleep, arm over my side, and as I lay there, wide awake and itchy in my lingerie set, it occurred to me: this was humiliating, unsexy, and, worst sin of all, boring. This wasn't comfort. This was paralysis. This was distance passing for connection. I was being desexualized in slow motion, becoming a teddy bear with breasts.

I think a fair amount about the fact that we're all going to die. It occurs to me at incredibly inopportune moments - I'll be standing in a bar, having managed to get an attractive guy to laugh, and I'll be laughing, too, and maybe dancing a little bit, and then everything goes slo-mo for a second and I'll think: Are these people aware that we're all going to the same place in the end?

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.

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

You used to own the night and put it to good use, during that sweet spot after your father could no longer tell you when to go to sleep and before you shared an apartment with someone else. Is togetherness killing your productivity? When's the last time you stayed up until 4:00 a.m. testing the boundaries of your consciousness and Googling serial killers? But then you remember how hard it was, that moment between wakefulness and sleep. How the moment of settling down was almost physically painful, your mind pulling away from your body like a balloon being sucked into the atmosphere. He settles that. He tells you that your day was rich enough and now it is time to wind down. He helps you sleep. People need sleep.

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.

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.

I never start anything with a really overt, political, or even exactly artistic mission statement.

If we follow the Buddhist logic that we are becoming part of glory of the universe, one huge consciousness, well, that's just too much togetherness for my taste. I couldn't even do a group art project in second grade. How am I going to share understanding with the rest of the creation? If this proves to be the case, I'm too much of a loner for death, but I'm also scared of being lonely. Where does that leave me?

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.

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.

My mom knows pretty well how I see her.

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

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.

Family first. Work second. Revenge third.

That being said, it's horrible when people you hate get things you want.

So I have to get started now. It's time to get started now. And why not? I wonder. I have a job. I am in love. We have an extra bedroom that we are currently using for shoes, boxes, and occasional guests. I am told my dog is unusually good with children. I already look fucking pregnant. Why the hell not.

Mouseburger: unpretty, unspecial, unformed.

Luxury is nice, but creativity is nicer.

I feel like you don't know if someone's equipped for a romantic relationship until they're out of their twenties.

Let's call a spade a spade - a lot of times when you are a vegetarian it is a just not very effective eating disorder.

It completely sickens me what our culture is doing to women. Last week I wore a big top and little shorts and a bunch of stuff came out saying I was without pants. 'The No-Pants Look,' it said. And I didn't go out without pants, I had shorts on ... If Olivia Wilde had gone to a party with a big silky top and little shorts she might have been told her outfit was cute ... What it was really: 'Why did you show us your thighs'?

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

Sometimes I was so bored that I started arguments just to experience the rush of almost losing him.

I love what I do, I love every minute of it.

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.

I was sure that, once I let someone penetrate me, my world would change in some indescribable yet fundamental way. I would never be able to hug my parents with the same innocence, and being alone with myself would have a different tenor. How could I ever experience true solitude again when I'd had someone poking around my insides? How permanent virginity feels, and then how inconsequential.

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. I obeyed his commands, sure that I could fulfill this role while still protecting the sacred place inside of me that I knew deserved more. Different. Better.
But that isn't how it works.

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

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.

When my sister was born, family legend has it that I asked my mother if we could reverse roles: "Let's tell her I'm her mother and you're her sister. She won't ever know!" Over

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

What a snarky jerk. (Obviously, I later slept with him.)

I should stop apologizing for being overly analytical about this, even though I am sorry (not to you but in a deeper way, sorry for my brain chemistry and who I am. I do what I can that isn't heroin to modify it but I was born as anxious and obsessive as any incredibly gorgeous child ever could be.)

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.

Okay, 'Best Party Ever'
to me, that's like saying 'Best Gym Ever' or 'Best Nature Documentary Ever,' like how good can it really be?

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.'

You're raised to think being a mother is an inevitable step in your development but you start to ask yourself questions, because not every woman does want to have children.

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

I have an agent now.

I thought I wanted to be a journalist or a novelist.

I frustrate myself as a writer. There are certain things that I'll think, 'Well, that would be really fun to play ... if somebody else was playing this character.'

A picture does not lie. It has the quality of an image taken by a ghost hunter, revealing floaters and spirits that the participants had been unable to see.

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

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

I have the nagging sense that my true friends are waiting for me, beyond college, unusual women whose ambitions are as big as their past transgressions, whose hair is piled high, dramatic like topiaries at Versailles, and who never, ever say "too much information" when you mention a sex dream you had about your father.

If a young woman is looking at the landscape of Hollywood, what she sees is almost only challenges.

And then, I made myself sick to my stomach for an apologie that never came.