Maya Lin Quotes

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

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.

I though about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over. A scar. The idea occurred to me there on the site. Take a knife and cut open the earth, and with time the grass would heal it. As if you cut open the rock and polished it.

To fly we have to have resistance.

An artist fights to retain the integrity of a work so that it remains a strong, clear vision. Art is and should be the act of an individual willing to say something new, something not quite familiar.

If we forget what used to be, then we’ve lost an ability to really be sensitive to our surroundings.

You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.

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

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.

If you don't remember history accurately, how can you learn?

Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole.

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.

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. Interest in the land and concern about how we are polluting the air and water of the planet are what make me want to travel back in geologic time-to witness the shaping of the earth before man.

Our lives are given meaning by our actions-accomplishments made while we are "here" that extend beyond our own time.

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.

Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next.

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.

To fly, we must have resistance.

I'm as much interested in the form-making as well as getting you to think about what we're doing to the world around us.

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.

All my work is much more peaceful than I am.

I didn't have anyone to play with so I made up my own world.

Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.

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.