Quotes By 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The role of art in society differs for every artist.

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.

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.

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.

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