Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Maya Lin
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 5
Architect
Designer
Land Artist
Landscape Architect
Printmaker
Sculptor
Athens
Ohio
Maya Ying Lin
Artist
Away
Come
Think
Dictate
Thinking
Conclusions
Viewers
Conclusion
Lost

More quotes by Maya Lin

Image
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
Image
The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.
Maya Lin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it.
Maya Lin
Image
For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.
Maya Lin
Image
To fly, we have to have resistance. It's all about turbulence. Reacting to images of wave patterns in fluid motion.
Maya Lin
Image
Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.
Maya Lin
Image
We were unusually brought up there was no gender differentiation. I was never thought of as any less than my brother.
Maya Lin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I always say I'm no different than a 19th-century landscape painter, it's just that we have these incredible tools to look at the Earth and look at the world around us differently.
Maya Lin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.
Maya Lin
Image
Every memorial in its time has a different goal.
Maya Lin
Image
If you don't remember history accurately, how can you learn?
Maya Lin
Image
Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.
Maya Lin