Maya Lin Quotes
Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.
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.
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.
An artist fights to retain the integrity of a work so that it remains a strong, clear vision. Art is and should be the act of an individual willing to say something new, something not quite familiar.
Our lives are given meaning by our actions-accomplishments made while we are "here" that extend beyond our own time.
You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.
If we forget what used to be, then we’ve lost an ability to really be sensitive to our surroundings.
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.
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.
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.
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 like to think of my work as creating a private conversation with each person, no matter how public each work is and no matter how many people are present
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.
Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next.
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.
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.
To fly, we have to have resistance. It's all about turbulence. Reacting to images of wave patterns in fluid motion.
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.
I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.
Some artists want to confront. Some want to invoke thought. They're all necessary and they're all valid.
When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family.
The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.
You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It's what you learn, what you think. That's all that counts.
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.
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 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.
My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
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.
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.
I'm as much interested in the form-making as well as getting you to think about what we're doing to the world around us.
We were unusually brought up; there was no gender differentiation. I was never thought of as any less than my brother.
I saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that has then been polished, like a geode.
