Maya Lin Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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.

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

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.

To fly, we have to have resistance. It's all about turbulence. Reacting to images of wave patterns in fluid motion.

Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.

I loved school. I studied like crazy. I was a Class A nerd.

Our parents decided not to teach us Chinese. It was an era when they felt we would be better off if we didn't have that complication.

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.

I always give the analogy of the Earth at Night picture, of 7.3 billion of us, right? And everyone says, "Well, that's population." Well, if you took the entire world's population and you lived at the density of Manhattan proper - not a bad place to live - how much space do 7.3 billion people take up? The state of Colorado. At which point I end my lectures, because I want you to be thinking ... is this really a question of population, or is this a question of land use and resource consumption? And let's face it, the top 1.3 billion of us are doing all the damage. Sorry.

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

I cannot force a design; I do not see this process as being under my conscious control.

I think I've always had an activist stance, yet at the same time, the other side of me - and this is where some people just don't get it, or they'd prefer it if the work was a lot uglier, a lot louder - I have this personality where I just want to put something out that's a fact and then let you interpret it. It's almost as if you might barely notice it, you might walk right by it, but you have to pay attention.

Every memorial in its time has a different goal.

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.

For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.

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.

It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it.

It terrified me to have an idea that was solely mine to be no longer a part of my mind, but totally public.

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.

Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have.

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.

I think I needed to really move past my first public work as memorialist, and be equally balanced. It's a bit unusual, to be working between the architecture, the art, and what I would say is a synthesis, the memorials - they're problem solving, but it's very symbolic. You get this triangle; I need to be balanced with those three. They're all equally a part of who I am. I love how different they are, and yet they're coming out the same thing, whatever it is.

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