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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.

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
Celebrities
Celebrity
Architect
Architecture
Function
Artist
Really
Make
Entertainers

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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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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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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It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it.
Maya Lin
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I was always making things. Even though art was what I did every day, it didn't even occur to me that I would be an artist.
Maya Lin
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To fly, we must have resistance.
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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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
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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 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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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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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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You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
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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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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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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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 definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.
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