Quotes By Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin
Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next.
Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin
Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.
Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin
You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.
Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin
You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin
I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.
Maya Lin
I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It's what you learn, what you think. That's all that counts.
Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin
We were unusually brought up; there was no gender differentiation. I was never thought of as any less than my brother.
Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin
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.
Maya Lin