Quotes By Maya Lin

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have.

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.

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.