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

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

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 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.

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.

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.