Maya Lin Quotes

"To fly we have to have resistance."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"We were unusually brought up; there was no gender differentiation. I was never thought of as any less than my brother."

"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."

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

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

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