Quotes By 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

All my work is much more peaceful than I am.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.

Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have.

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.

Every memorial in its time has a different goal.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.