Top 296 Quotes & Sayings by Lena Dunham - Page 3

Directing is about as visual as I get and I will leave artmaking to the rest of the family.

My dad once told me that he would rather I had an old boyfriend than a tall boyfriend. I don't know why, I think he's just feels stressed by... He' not that short I just think the idea of a really tall guy is super anxiety producing to him. And now I'm with neither old guy nor a very tall guy. So everything has worked out perfectly.

Mine's [fans] a lot of like weird guys in prison. So I don't need to answer them.

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.

I have sort of a Zen body philosophy, I'm sort of like: we're one weight one day, we're one weight another day, and some day our body just doesn't even exist at all! It's just a vessel I've been given to move through this life. I think about my body as a tool to do the stuff I need to do, but not the be all and end all of my existence. Which sounds like I spent a week at a meditation retreat, but it's genuinely how I feel.

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

There is no way that my mother hasn't influenced my career. She's my first critic. She's my best critic. She has the best instincts from writing to style to editing, to the visual elements of my career.

When someone anonymous tells me I'm fat, that's not a person to me. If they're not going to acknowledge me as a person, I'm certainly not going to acknowledge them as a person.

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

But I am a girl with a keen interest in having it all, and what follows are hopeful dispatches from the frontlines of that struggle.

I think some people are really connected to who they were as children. And some people aren't.

I'm so in awe of what visual artists do and I do understand the differences of what visual artists do. I have a small art collection I hope to expand.

From what I hear, [ "Fifty Shades of Grey" ] is not a way that I feel like I need to be turned on or like a hole that needs to be filled in me.

I don't think anyone would want to come to my gallery show.

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

I don"t feel like there are a tremendous amount of roles for the size I am.

I'm not jealous in traditional ways - of boyfriends or babies or bank accounts - but I do covet other women's styles of being.

Here's who it's okay to share a bed with: . . . A heating pad. An empty bag of pita chips. The love of your life.

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.

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

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.

When we, as young women, are given the space to read, the act becomes a happy, private corner we can return to for the rest of our lives. We develop this love of reading by turning to stories that speak to the most special, secret parts of us.

I think we all feel that way when we're young we don't think teachers have lives. We don't think therapists have lives. We don't think doctors have lives.

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.

The people accusing me of being productive don't know how hard it is for me to just bend my elbow sometimes.

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.

One of the reasons I'm so proud of my mother is she took her skills of over a 40 years photographic career and translated that to a film.

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.

I would have specific books [when I was 12 or 13] that had pages that I knew had sex on them that I would go and read.

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

Scandal has made wine and popcorn seem like a viable, even healthful, meal.

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.

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.

It's not that I don't want to hear about that [blow job] stuff, I just want to hear about it immediately. And I want to hear about it on more comfortable terms.

I never set out to make any statements about a specific character, I just set out to tell what feels like is a truthful story, a person that you and I might truly encounter.

I wish that author [ E. L. James] all the success in the world. It's just not for me.

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?'

I felt like I was a writer, and I just thought filmmaking was the best way for me to express that, because it allows me to embrace the visual world that I love. It's allows me to interact with people, to be more social than fiction or poetry, and it felt like the right way for me to tell the stories that felt pressing to me.

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 used to think Twitter was a waste of time and sort of ran counter to my ability to be productive and to write and now Twitter feels like a really cool part of the creative experience.

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 get a lot of unasked for sexual confessions.

I remember it made me feel better because so many of my friends at school. Were doing that stuff and doing that stuff on sleep overs. But I just didn't feel ready. It wasn't like I had any judgment of it being two women. It would have scared me as much if not more. I was like a three month period in which all the words sleep over was code for was "let's get together and touch each other's vaginas." and I was. Haunted. And I remember going home and feeling like I couldn't tell my mother even though she would've understood and probably laughed.

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

Artists themselves are neurotic and fearful people, and you can look at their work and figure out what they're scared of.

The idea of being a feminist-so many women have come to this idea of it being anti-male and not able to connect with the opposite sex-but what feminism is about is equality and human rights. For me that is just an essential part of my identity. I hope [Girls] contributes to a continuance of feminist dialogue

I always thought that if you had any real proximity to famous people, that your obsession with famous people, would wane is some way. Like, I wouldn't want to deep google Matthew McConaughey's early relationships for hours before I go to bed. And it's just gotten worse.

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

Like Summer Sisters comforted me just because I was like, okay things I've seen with my own eyes are not so terrible, and even though I knew adult gay people and had absolutely no issue with it. And I just couldn't articulate what made me so uncomfortable about the space that I shared with my friends becoming a sexual space. And it was very healing for me to read that, and feel like it was a part of other friendships, even fictional friendships I admire.

I thought about ["Summer Sisters" ] so often as I was writing about these female characters who love each other and hated each other and were sort of in love with each other.

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.

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

We're the last f - ing people who have a f - ing opinion on what you should do with your body. Anything that makes your day easier, as long as you're not feeding your baby crack in milk, is really good by us.

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?

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.

I don't really have a place where people can reach me via email because it got a little overwhelming. People tweet things at me like, "oh DM me for a great story that you'll definitely need to use on the show," which I don't, you know, DM them.

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

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

I really loved ["The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P" by Adelle Waldman]. It's having a really hot moment. Unlike many hot books, it's actually really wonderful. I tend to have that reaction: I don't want to read it if everyone thinks it's cool. It was a really interesting insight into being young and male. Now that made me feel really thankful for my boyfriend and really thankful because he wasn't like that protagonist, but I know so many people who are like that protagonist.

Feminists believe that men and women should have the same opportunities. If you are a feminist you believe in equal rights as a whole. That’s not a concept you can really shoot down.