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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.
- Maya Lin Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

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 Quote

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 Quote

My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
- Maya Lin Quote

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 Quote

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

Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.
- Maya Lin Quote

The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.
- Maya Lin Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

To fly we have to have resistance.
- Maya Lin Quote

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 Quote

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

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 Quote

You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
- Maya Lin Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote