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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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Maya Lin
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 5
Architect
Designer
Land Artist
Landscape Architect
Printmaker
Sculptor
Athens
Ohio
Maya Ying Lin
Creative
True
Sometimes
Shut
Think
Field
Thinking
Fields
Creativity
Completely
Stop

More quotes by 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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You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
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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My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
Maya Lin
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If we forget what used to be, then we’ve lost an ability to really be sensitive to our surroundings.
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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Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.
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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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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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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My goal is to strip things down so that you need just the right amount of words or shape to convey what you need to convey. I like editing. I like it very tight.
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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The role of art in society differs for every artist.
Maya Lin
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Every memorial in its time has a different goal.
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
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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 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.
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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For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.
Maya Lin
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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.
Maya Lin