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
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. – 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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost. – 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn’t predicate what you might do next. – Maya Lin
