Maya Lin Quotes
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I can't shout out, "Do this." I don't want to be prescriptive. I want to give you facts, and that's the way I've always operated, whether it's a historical fact or a scientific fact, and then you actually have to connect it in your brain.
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I do not think you can find a reason for everything you make.
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It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it.
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I also wanted remembering the past relevant to the present. Some people wanted me to put the names in alphabetical order. I wanted them in chronological order so that a veteran could find his time within the panel. It's like a thread of life.
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I like to think of my work as creating a private conversation with each person, no matter how public each work is and no matter how many people are present
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I begin by imagining an artwork verbally. I try to describe in writing what the project is, what it is trying to do. I need to understand the artwork without giving it a specific materiality or solid form.
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Competitions are what you do as a good exercise.
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I cannot force a design; I do not see this process as being under my conscious control.
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I saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that has then been polished, like a geode.
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Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.
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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.
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My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
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My grandfather, on my father's side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar.
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You really can't function as a celebrity. Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an architect. I'm an artist. I make things.
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I'm not in a hurry to do a lot of projects. I am very resolved in each project I take on.
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For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.
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It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.
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If we forget what used to be, then we’ve lost an ability to really be sensitive to our surroundings.
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Every memorial in its time has a different goal.
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I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.
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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.
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Some artists want to confront. Some want to invoke thought. They're all necessary and they're all valid.
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I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.
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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.
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I always say I'm no different than a 19th-century landscape painter, it's just that we have these incredible tools to look at the Earth and look at the world around us differently.
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To fly we have to have resistance.
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We know under Nebraska there is an underground aquifer that is probably underneath the whole state, but what form does it take? I kind of want to focus on that, for almost political means, because we keep digging more wells. We're not replenishing, and we're having a crisis in water around the world. But how do you visualize it? I don't know, so I know what I want to study.
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The role of art in society differs for every artist.
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Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.
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Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have.
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