Maya Lin Quotes

To fly we have to have resistance.

— Maya Lin

“I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It's what you learn, what you think. That's all that counts.”

— Maya Lin

“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.”

— Maya Lin

“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.”

— Maya Lin

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

— Maya Lin

“The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.”

— Maya Lin

“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.”

— Maya Lin

“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.”

— Maya Lin

“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.”

— Maya Lin

“Every memorial in its time has a different goal.”

— Maya Lin

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

— Maya Lin

“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.”

— Maya Lin

“I loved school. I studied like crazy. I was a Class A nerd.”

— 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.”

— Maya Lin

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.

— Maya Lin

“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.”

— 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.

— Maya Lin

“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.”

— Maya Lin

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

— Maya Lin

“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.”

— 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.”

— Maya Lin

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

— Maya Lin

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.

— Maya Lin

“It terrified me to have an idea that was solely mine to be no longer a part of my mind, but totally public.”

— Maya Lin

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

— Maya Lin

“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.”

— Maya Lin

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

— Maya Lin

“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.”

— Maya Lin

Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have.

— Maya Lin

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

— Maya Lin

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.

— Maya Lin

“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.”

— Maya Lin

When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family.

— Maya Lin

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

— Maya Lin

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

— Maya Lin

“Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.”

— Maya Lin

“I also wanted remembering the past relevant to the present. Some people wanted me to put the names in alphabetical order. I wanted them in chronological order so that a veteran could find his time within the panel. It's like a thread of life.”

— Maya Lin

“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”

— Maya Lin

“To fly, we have to have resistance. It's all about turbulence. Reacting to images of wave patterns in fluid motion.”

— Maya Lin

“Our lives are given meaning by our actions-accomplishments made while we are "here" that extend beyond our own time.”

— Maya Lin

“If you don't remember history accurately, how can you learn?”

— Maya Lin

“Competitions are what you do as a good exercise.”

— Maya Lin

“To fly, we must have resistance.”

— Maya Lin

Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole.

— Maya Lin

“If we forget what used to be, then we've lost an ability to really be sensitive to our surroundings.”

— Maya Lin

“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.”

— Maya Lin

“You really can't function as a celebrity. Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an architect. I'm an artist. I make things.”

— Maya Lin

I begin by imagining an artwork verbally. I try to describe in writing what the project is, what it is trying to do. I need to understand the artwork without giving it a specific materiality or solid form.

— Maya Lin

I do not think you can find a reason for everything you make.

— Maya Lin

“I cannot force a design; I do not see this process as being under my conscious control.”

— Maya Lin