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

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
Things
Never
Drawn
Architecture
Built
Part
Way

More quotes by 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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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
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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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I'm as much interested in the form-making as well as getting you to think about what we're doing to the world around us.
Maya Lin
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The role of art in society differs for every artist.
Maya Lin
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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.
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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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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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.
Maya Lin
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If you don't remember history accurately, how can you learn?
Maya Lin
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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.
Maya Lin
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The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.
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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To fly, we have to have resistance. It's all about turbulence. Reacting to images of wave patterns in fluid motion.
Maya Lin
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To fly we have to have resistance.
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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I also wanted remembering the past relevant to the present. Some people wanted me to put the names in alphabetical order. I wanted them in chronological order so that a veteran could find his time within the panel. It's like a thread of life.
Maya Lin
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I begin by imagining an artwork verbally. I try to describe in writing what the project is, what it is trying to do. I need to understand the artwork without giving it a specific materiality or solid form.
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 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.
Maya Lin