Lena Dunham quotes:

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.

Positive, healthy, loving relationships in your twenties... I don't know if anyone would disagree with it: I think they're the exception, not the norm. People are either playing house really aggressively because they're scared of what an uncertain time it is, or they're avoiding commitment altogether.

I'm ridiculous in my oversharing; my mom and sister are very open but a little more judicious than me... and my father is a decidedly private person.

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.

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.

You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.

I always thought the saddest feeling in life is when you're dancing in a really joyful way and then you hit your head on something.

I never thought of myself as like, a funny person.

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.'

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.

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.

If you're writing, you're starting in private. It can really be this amazing, private, freeing experience. Forget that it's for other people - that comes in later.

When I graduated college I had a series of just humiliating jobs that I couldn't believe I was at.

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

I'm always having to be told to brush my hair.

None of my actions have ever sort of been motored by the search for a husband or wondering if I was going to have a family someday or wanting to live in a really great house or thinking it would be really great to have a diamond.

I'm not great at dating, but I need to do it to relax.

I think breakfast is the one meal when you don't have to eat animal, maybe.

There is something vulnerable about showing your tattoos to people, even while it gives you a feeling that you are wearing a sleeve when you are naked.

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'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.

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

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.

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.

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

My parents were very supportive when I was growing up and have been all the way through.

I do think girls in their twenties accept certain kinds of lesser treatment than they would at other times in their lives.

I've only recently realized that I have a radically different relationship with my parents than a lot of people.

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.

It's almost like when you're young, your friends take on the romance role, and then guys take on the role of your friends later.

I kind of look like every other girl, walking around.

My parents are artists; in their world, in the world of modern artists, you are supposed to just go into your studio and tune everything out, and your entire relationship with your work is supposed to be a super private one. That was the way to do it and you weren't deeply truly artistic if that wasn't the way you were engaging the press.

You know, when I first started making online videos, there were a lot of filmmakers I befriended who were doing it too.

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

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.

At my age, no one is married, no one has kids, no one has a career.

I love flawed female characters, duking it out.

Here's what I have to say about being married: someday you will look at him, hating him with every fiber of your being, wishing that he would die the most violent death possible. It will pass.--Hannah Horvath's dying grandmother

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

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.

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?

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

Calling someone a drama queen is so negative. Why not 'content creator'?

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."

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

I am not a particularly political person, but, as a Tribeca resident, the commodification of September 11th is offensive to me.

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.

I went to schools that were small enough that basically everyone was in a play. I played a bouncing ball in a production of Alice in Wonderland and a fat man in an Italian commedia dell'arte play. I was given some small chances.

Don't wait around for someone else to tell your story. Do it yourself by whatever means necessary.

The fact is that I write under duress, often in my bed, often at the last minute. I'm kind of a binge writer I would say, which I don't support. I was always kind of that way. Probably the time I was the most regular as a writer was college. It was like, what else is there to do when you're living in the Midwest studying creative writing?

Every time I start feeling sexy I trip.

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.

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 have never been a physically engaged person. Like, I was not an athletic kid. I was the kid who came up with a thousand excuses not to take a gym class. Even now, if I could, I would do all my work from bed.

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.

I just hope that I continue to keep a line between my private life and who I play, even if they are closely intertwined, and so I'm careful. I don't even know where my line is, but I know I have a line.

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

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.

I can play very annoying girl, very lost girl and then all the things in the spectrum between.

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.

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.

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

I mean, I - it's so funny, I am, you know, I am, you know, a working woman out in the world, but I still live with my parents half the time. I've been sort of taking this very long, stuttering period of moving out.

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.

In Hollywood, you've got a hundred people on set, and shooting the sex scene you're wearing nude-toned underwear and tape on your nipples. Nothing is going beyond where you want it to go.

My sister is bold, independent, and not afraid to wear overalls. Some of her first words as a child were "that's not fair," and she's been committed to social justice ever since. She's my hero.

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 wanted to be a poet. I had a really romantic idea about what that would mean. My parents knew some poets, and I liked how they dressed and acted, but I didn't really acknowledge that I only liked reading some bits of poetry while I was peeing or something.

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...

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.

It's funny, I never considered that people are going to see me on the show and maybe stop me on the subway.

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

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.

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

I refresh Twitter as thoughtlessly as some twirl their hair.

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

My fears came true: People called me fat and hideous, and I lived. And now I keep living.

I consider being female such a unique gift, such a sacred joy, in ways that run so deep I can't articulate them. 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.

Here's what I have to say about being married: someday you will look at him, hating him with every fibre of your being, wishing that he would die the most violent death possible. It will pass.

I have work, and then I have a dinner thing. And then I am busy, trying to become who I am.

My dad finds Twitter just infinitely unrelatable. He's like, 'Why would I want to tell anybody what I had for a snack, it's private?!' And I'm like, 'Why would you even have a snack if you didn't tell anybody? Why bother eating?'

I went to an amazing school in Brooklyn called St. Anne's that's a really kind of creative hot bed.

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

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

I've had moments of deep self-involvement that didn't come from a place of loving myself but quite the opposite.

The joke I always make about myself is that I'm self-involved, but I'm not vain.

I had no friends. I worried a lot.

I thought I was really a radical, political person, which of course I am not.

My weight fluctuates depending on my mood and my current devotion to my fitness routine.

My mom knows pretty well how I see her.

I have to write people who feel honest but also push our cultural ball forward.

I love directing scenes that I'm not in because suddenly I really feel like a filmmaker which is a different thing.

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

A huge part of the American trans population that's often overlooked are trans teenagers. Many of them are homeless, and those are not the people who are necessarily going in for a custom suit. But that's one of the reasons why we were excited that we got to do a contest with HBO to sponsor a young person getting a suit made who might not have the means to do it on their own.

As a woman who doesn't necessarily fit the beauty standard in Hollywood...I really related to the narrative of looking for something you felt comfortable in that would properly express your identity, especially when your identity didn't feel like it necessarily matched the one that was being imposed on you.

Barbieâ??s disfigured. Itâ??s fine to play with her just as long as you keep that in mind.

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

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.

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.

Can we call a moratorium on the use of the term 'ladyparts'? Grazia!

Confidence lets you pull anything off, even Tevas with socks.

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

Don't put yourself in situations you'd like to run away from. But when you run, run back to yourself.

Enjoy going through life as yourself.

Everyone needs something from me.

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.

For straight, hetero people it's very easy to unintentionally say something that might not honor people's identities fully, and Grace [Dunham] is a really amazing educational resource.

Guys warning girls not to fall in love with them is so truly douchey that it should have a higher success rate.

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

I always feel that there are two choices for women. Either be totally confident about your non-size-zero body and say, 'I love what I look like and this is who I am,' or be the person who is obsessed with diet and exercise and keeping toned. What feels more realistic to me is that some days I wake up and think I love how I look. On other days I say, 'If I had real self-control, I would be 10 pounds lighter.' That contradiction is, to me, what being a girl actually feels like.

I always say that I can play sort of six variations on one girl, all of whom are a variation on me. Maybe I'll think of myself as an actor if, like, I do a corset drama.

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.

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 can never be who I was. I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding, and some measure of awe. There she goes, backpack on, headed for the subway or the airport. She did her best with her eyeliner. She learned a new word she wants to try out on you. She is ambling along. She is looking for it.

I canâ??t imagine a passionate affair with a native man

I deserved kisses. I deserved to be treated like a piece of meat but also respected for my intellect.

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.

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.