Quotes By Maya Lin

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have.

All my work is much more peaceful than I am.

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.