Quotes from Maya Lin

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

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

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

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.

Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.

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 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.

war is not just a victory or loss ... People die.

An artist fights to retain the integrity of a work so that it remains a strong, clear vision. Art is and should be the act of an individual willing to say something new, something not quite familiar.

I like to think of my work as creating a private conversation with each person, no matter how public each work is and no matter how many people are present

All my work is much more peaceful than I am.

Our lives are given meaning by our actions-accomplishments made while we are "here" that extend beyond our own time.

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.

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

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.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

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.

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.