Entertainment
Celebrate Lena Dunham's Birthday With 8 Of Her Most Defining Quotes on Sex, 'Girls' & More
The woman made famous for her musings on the twentysomething lifestyle is now but two years away from leaving her twenties: It's Lena Dunham's 28th birthday! And yes, she continues to make other less prominent twentysomethings feel lazy and/or unsuccessful. She also keeps saying things — things that spawn a ride range of reactions. We've gathered some of her more hilarious and/or insightful and/or just generally relatable quotes, because what better time than her birthday to sit back and remember why Lena Dunham's voice is such a prominent one?
On Success
“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.” — at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit
On Relatability
“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.” — Hitfix
On pants, succinctly
“I am anti-pants.” — The Awl
On courage
“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.” — Interview
On how girls are trained to talk about their work
“Girls are trained to say, ‘I wrote this, but it’s probably really stupid.’ Well, no, you wouldn’t write a novel if you thought it was really stupid. Men are much more comfortable going, ‘I wrote this book because I have a unique perspective that the world needs to hear.’ Girls are taught from the age of seven that if you get a compliment, you don’t go, ‘Thank you’, you go, ‘No, you’re insane.’” — The Guardian
On the sex on 'Girls'
“It’s like, ‘Have you been out on the street lately?’ Everyone dates everyone, for lots of reasons we can’t understand. Sexuality isn’t a perfect puzzle, like, ‘He has a nice nose and she has a nice nose! She’s got great breasts and he’s got great calves! And so they’re going to live happily ever after in a house that was purchased with their modeling money!’ It’s a complicated thing. I want people ultimately, even if they’re disturbed by certain moments, to feel bolstered and normalized by the sex that’s on the show.” — Vogue
On normalizing things through television
“I seriously consider television to be the people’s medium. Like the idea of seeing your parents naked or having somebody go down on you and worrying about whether you smell or worrying about whether your body is weird or what goes across the face of a person who’s supposed to be experiencing pleasure but isn’t – those are things I’d love to normalize on TV.” — New York Times
On social media
“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?’” — The Awl
