Quotes from Maya Lin

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.

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.

When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

To fly we have to have resistance.

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.

For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.