Quotes By Maya Lin

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Every memorial in its time has a different goal.

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.

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.

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

The role of art in society differs for every 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

To fly we have to have resistance.

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.

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

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

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.