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
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
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. – Maya Lin
Some artists want to confront. Some want to invoke thought. They’re all necessary and they’re all valid. – Maya Lin
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. – 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
Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that’s true in any creative field. – 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
You couldn’t put me in a social group setting. I’m probably a terrible anarchist deep down. – 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
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
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
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
My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions. – 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
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
We were unusually brought up; there was no gender differentiation. I was never thought of as any less than my brother. – 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 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. – Maya Lin
