Maya Lin Quotes

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.

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

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

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

war is not just a victory or loss ... People die.

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

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

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

The role of art in society differs for every artist.

I always say I'm no different than a 19th-century landscape painter, it's just that we have these incredible tools to look at the Earth and look at the world around us differently.

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

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.

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.

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.

If you don't remember history accurately, how can you learn?

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

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.

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.

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.

I like to think of my work as creating a private conversation with each person, no matter how public each work is and no matter how many people are present

An artist fights to retain the integrity of a work so that it remains a strong, clear vision. Art is and should be the act of an individual willing to say something new, something not quite familiar.

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

I think I've always had an activist stance, yet at the same time, the other side of me - and this is where some people just don't get it, or they'd prefer it if the work was a lot uglier, a lot louder - I have this personality where I just want to put something out that's a fact and then let you interpret it. It's almost as if you might barely notice it, you might walk right by it, but you have to pay attention.

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

I can't shout out, "Do this." I don't want to be prescriptive. I want to give you facts, and that's the way I've always operated, whether it's a historical fact or a scientific fact, and then you actually have to connect it in your brain.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

I probably have fundamentally antisocial tendencies. I never took one extracurricular activity. I just failed utterly at that level. Part of me still rebels against that.

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.

I though about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over. A scar. The idea occurred to me there on the site. Take a knife and cut open the earth, and with time the grass would heal it. As if you cut open the rock and polished it.

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 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. Interest in the land and concern about how we are polluting the air and water of the planet are what make me want to travel back in geologic time-to witness the shaping of the earth before man.

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

I think I needed to really move past my first public work as memorialist, and be equally balanced. It's a bit unusual, to be working between the architecture, the art, and what I would say is a synthesis, the memorials - they're problem solving, but it's very symbolic. You get this triangle; I need to be balanced with those three. They're all equally a part of who I am. I love how different they are, and yet they're coming out the same thing, whatever it is.

I do not think you can find a reason for everything you make.