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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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Maya Lin
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 5
Architect
Designer
Land Artist
Landscape Architect
Printmaker
Sculptor
Athens
Ohio
Maya Ying Lin
Anything
Irrelevant
Vietnam
Happened
Politics
Eclipsed
Read
Veterans
War
Memorial
Artist
Veteran
Felt
Deliberately

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Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.
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My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My dad was dean of fine arts at the university. I was casting bronzes in the school foundry. I was using the university as a playground.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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