Maya Lin Quotes

Growing up, I thought I was white. It didn't occur to me I was Asian-American until I was studying abroad in Denmark and there was a little bit of prejudice.

I had very few friends. We always ate dinner with our parents. We didn't want to go out. American adolescence was a lot wilder than I would have felt comfortable with.

The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical.

You have to have conviction and completely question everything and anything you do. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you know, the side of your brain that has the smarts won't necessarily help you in making art.

When I was building the Vietnam Memorial, I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war, because from my point of view, you don't pry into other people's business.

I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them.

Our parents decided not to teach us Chinese. It was an era when they felt we would be better off if we didn't have that complication.

How we are using up our home, how we are living and polluting the planet is frightening. It was evident when I was a child. It's more evident now.

To me, the American Dream is being able to follow your own personal calling. To be able to do what you want to do is incredible freedom.

Our lives are given meaning by our actions-accomplishments made while we are "here" that extend beyond our own time.

If we can't face death, we'll never overcome it. You have to look it straight in the eye. Then you can turn around and walk back out into the light.

Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole.

I didn't have anyone to play with so I made up my own world.

It was a requirement by the veterans to list the 57,000 names. We're reaching a time that we'll acknowledge the individual in a war on a national level.

When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family.

I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.

I begin by imagining an artwork verbally. I try to describe in writing what the project is, what it is trying to do. I need to understand the artwork without giving it a specific materiality or solid form.

I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.

I'm as much interested in the form-making as well as getting you to think about what we're doing to the world around us.

I was probably the first kid in my high school to go to Yale. I applied almost as a lark. Then, when I got there, I was the dumbest person in your class.

Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.

I was always making things. Even though art was what I did every day, it didn't even occur to me that I would be an artist.

I also wanted remembering the past relevant to the present. Some people wanted me to put the names in alphabetical order. I wanted them in chronological order so that a veteran could find his time within the panel. It's like a thread of life.

We were unusually brought up; there was no gender differentiation. I was never thought of as any less than my brother.

The role of art in society differs for every artist.

Some artists want to confront. Some want to invoke thought. They're all necessary and they're all valid.

It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it.

To fly we have to have resistance.

I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It's what you learn, what you think. That's all that counts.

Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

Every memorial in its time has a different goal.

I loved school. I studied like crazy. I was a Class A nerd.

The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.

You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.

I really enjoyed hanging out with some of the teachers. This one chemistry teacher, she liked hanging out. I liked making explosives. We would stay after school and blow things up.

If we forget what used to be, then we've lost an ability to really be sensitive to our surroundings.

I saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that has then been polished, like a geode.

My goal is to strip things down so that you need just the right amount of words or shape to convey what you need to convey. I like editing. I like it very tight.

The only thing that mattered was what you were to do in life, and it wasn't about money. It was about teaching, or learning.

My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.

I cannot force a design; I do not see this process as being under my conscious control.

Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don't want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.

To fly, we have to have resistance. It's all about turbulence. Reacting to images of wave patterns in fluid motion.

A lot of my works deal with a passage, which is about time. I don't see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time.

Competitions are what you do as a good exercise.

You really can't function as a celebrity. Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an architect. I'm an artist. I make things.