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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.

Maya Lin

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Maya Lin
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 5
Architect
Designer
Land Artist
Landscape Architect
Printmaker
Sculptor
Athens
Ohio
Maya Ying Lin
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Veterans
War
Memorial
Business
Veteran
Artist
Vietnam
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More quotes by Maya Lin

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You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
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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.
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Sometimes I think creativity is magic it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.
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The role of art in society differs for every artist.
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You really can't function as a celebrity. Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an architect. I'm an artist. I make things.
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My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
Maya Lin
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I saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that has then been polished, like a geode. Interest in the land and concern about how we are polluting the air and water of the planet are what make me want to travel back in geologic time-to witness the shaping of the earth before man.
Maya Lin
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Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.
Maya Lin
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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.
Maya Lin
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When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family.
Maya Lin
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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.
Maya Lin
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It terrified me to have an idea that was solely mine to be no longer a part of my mind, but totally public.
Maya Lin
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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.
Maya Lin
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It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it.
Maya Lin
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For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.
Maya Lin
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We were unusually brought up there was no gender differentiation. I was never thought of as any less than my brother.
Maya Lin
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You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.
Maya Lin
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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.
Maya Lin
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If you don't remember history accurately, how can you learn?
Maya Lin
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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.
Maya Lin