"Our parents decided not to teach us Chinese. It was an era when they felt we would be better off if we didn't have that complication."
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Quote collection
Maya Lin quotes (page 2 of 5)
81 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next."
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"Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture."
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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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"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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"It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like."
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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."
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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."
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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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"I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination."
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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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"I loved school. I studied like crazy. I was a Class A nerd."
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"Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles."
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"Some artists want to confront. Some want to invoke thought. They're all necessary and they're all valid."
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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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"Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have."
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"It was a requirement by the veterans to list the 57,000 names. We're reaching a time that we'll acknowledge the individual in a war on a national level."
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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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"I was probably the first kid in my high school to go to Yale. I applied almost as a lark. Then, when I got there, I was the dumbest person in your class."
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