Quotes By Maya Lin

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.

The role of art in society differs for every artist.

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.

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.

To fly we have to have resistance.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.

I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.