Maya Lin

“All my work is much more peaceful than I am.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It's what you learn, what you think. That's all that counts.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I'm not in a hurry to do a lot of projects. I am very resolved in each project I take on.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.”

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

“To fly we have to have resistance.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.”