Maya Lin Quotes
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You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.
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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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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.
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You should be having more fun in high school, exploring things because you want to explore them and learning because you love learning-not worrying about competition.
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Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.
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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.
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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.
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Every memorial in its time has a different goal.
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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.
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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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We were unusually brought up; there was no gender differentiation. I was never thought of as any less than my brother.
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The role of art in society differs for every artist.
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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.
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All my work is much more peaceful than I am.
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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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I loved school. I studied like crazy. I was a Class A nerd.
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Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.
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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 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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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.
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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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Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next.
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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.
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For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.