Maya Lin Quotes
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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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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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Growing up, I thought I was white. It didn't occur to me I was Asian-American until I was studying abroad in Denmark and there was a little bit of prejudice.
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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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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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My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
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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.
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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.
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The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.
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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 was always making things. Even though art was what I did every day, it didn't even occur to me that I would be an artist.
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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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Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have.
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I didn't have anyone to play with so I made up my own world.
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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.
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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.
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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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When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family.
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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.
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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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It terrified me to have an idea that was solely mine to be no longer a part of my mind, but totally public.
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I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It's what you learn, what you think. That's all that counts.
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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.
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It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it.