Top 33 Maya Lin Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The role of art in society differs for every artist.

To fly we have to have resistance.

Warmth isn’t what minimalists are thought to have.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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