Maya Lin Artist Quotations

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

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.

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.

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

The role of art in society differs for every artist.

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

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.

You really can't function as a celebrity. Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an architect. I'm an artist. I make things.

You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.

My grandfather, on my father's side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar.

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.

How we are using up our home, how we are living and polluting the planet is frightening. It was evident when I was a child. It's more evident now.

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.

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

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

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.