Maya Lin's Quotes

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 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.

I started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere.

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.

In art or architecture your project is only done when you say it's done. If you want to rip it apart at the eleventh hour and start all over again, you never finish. I was one of those crazy creatures.

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.

OK, it was black, it was below grade, I was female, Asian American, young, too young to have served. Yet I think none of the opposition in that sense hurt me.

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.

You should be having more fun in high school, exploring things because you want to explore them and learning because you love learning-not worrying about competition.

To fly we have to have resistance.

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.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.

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.

Every memorial in its time has a different goal.

I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.

Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have.

All my work is much more peaceful than I am.

Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture.

For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.

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.

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

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

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

I'm not in a hurry to do a lot of projects. I am very resolved in each project I take on.

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.

It terrified me to have an idea that was solely mine to be no longer a part of my mind, but totally public.

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

It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.

My dad was dean of fine arts at the university. I was casting bronzes in the school foundry. I was using the university as a playground.

My grandfather, on my father's side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar.

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

Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next.