Lena Dunham Quotes

I want things to be characters and not me. Why would I want to play me?

On 'Old School,' I was not an actor, I was Snoop Dogg, so I came to the set with a whole different vibe, and a different crew of people. And on 'Starsky and Hutch,' I was more of an actor. I wasn't Snoop Dogg, the rapper.

I just try to put myself in the sense of being a character, sometimes male. I suppose I just like the idea of trying to be different people coming from all kinds of different angles. Most of it was just from my imagination.

I really become the characters when I'm writing them. I'll become one or two of them more than others, I'm consistent that way.

People watch me when I get into these characters that I have in my head, so perhaps I should try acting. So I did.

If you're writing on your own, each character is just you. It's just you.

I don't think there's a certain part of a character I take with me. There's a certain part of me I leave with each character, though.

I write to be the characters that I am not.

I made some shorts that I'm not in. I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me. But my way into making movies has been through performing. My very first short film, I played a child and her own mother. So in some ways, to me, my great achievement so far is just that I've gotten all these other people to play the other parts. That's what makes it a real movie.

You have total control of it, and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it, you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at first - though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property.

With every character, you alter, you can’t be attached to your own identity.

I love my job, I love being an actor and stepping into the shoes of different characters and exploring their lives. It's enriched my life extremely. I've learned more about myself and the ways of life through being an actor.

I think there are parts of myself in every character I play.

That's what I love about acting, you get to find little pieces of yourself in every character you play.

The idea of transformation - playing something I'm not - is the bit I enjoy most about acting.

I started to make my own films, however small and however independent they were, from the beginning. And so, even though I was nobody, I was always the master of my own work.

Well, I think that in every character there are little bits and pieces of yourself.

It's wonderful when you can play a character that pulls all sorts of strings inside of you and fills you emotionally.

It is joyous for any actor to enter other grounds of consciousness and thought. At the end of the day, we just all like dressing up and playing around.

I don't play many characters like myself. Oh I don't know what I am!

That's part of the beauty of being an actress: you get to explore different facets of what it is to be a human being and what it is to explore different personalities, and actually, that's one of the things I love about it.

It's really fun to put yourself into a character - into shoes you wouldn't normally be in.

I mean, he's one of the greatest characters I've gotten to play over my career, so there's a little bit of me in Zuko and a little bit of Zuko in me.

Playing interesting characters makes me feel alive.

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.