Maya Lin

Architect

1959-10-05

Quotes by Maya Lin

• Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.

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• You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.

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• 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.

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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 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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• 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.

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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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• 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.

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• 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.

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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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• 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.

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• 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.

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