Maya Lin Quotes

Author Image

Maya Lin

Profession : Architect

Birth : October 5, 1959

To fly, we have to have resistance.

Maya Lin

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.

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

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.

Maya Lin

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

Maya Lin

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

Maya Lin

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.

Maya Lin

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

Maya Lin

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

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

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

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

Maya Lin

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

Maya Lin

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.

Maya Lin

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.

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

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

Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have.

Maya Lin

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

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