A biography for Maya Linhasn’t been written yet.
“When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family.”
“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.”
“For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The role of art in society differs for every artist.”
“I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.”
“My grandfather, on my father's side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.”
“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.”
“Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.”
“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.”
“The only thing that mattered was what you were to do in life, and it wasn't about money. It was about teaching, or learning.”
“I didn't have anyone to play with so I made up my own world.”
“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.”
“Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next.”
“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.”
“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.”