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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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Maya Lin
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 5
Architect
Designer
Land Artist
Landscape Architect
Printmaker
Sculptor
Athens
Ohio
Maya Ying Lin
Would
Comfortable
Parents
Parent
Friends
American
Wilder
Felt
Adolescence
Didn
Pregnancy
Always
Dinner

More quotes by Maya Lin

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If you don't remember history accurately, how can you learn?
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Every memorial in its time has a different goal.
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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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Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don't want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.
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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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My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
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Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole.
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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.
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You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
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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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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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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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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 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 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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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
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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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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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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