Top 70 Maya Lin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.”

— Maya Lin

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2. “To fly we have to have resistance.”

— Maya Lin

3. “To me, the American Dream is being able to follow your own personal calling. To be able to do what you want to do is incredible freedom.”

— Maya Lin

4. “I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That’s art to me.”

— Maya Lin

5. “Math, it’s a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.”

— Maya Lin

6. “An artist fights to retain the integrity of a work so that it remains a strong, clear vision. Art is and should be the act of an individual willing to say something new, something not quite familiar.”

— Maya Lin

7. “Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it’s not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.”

— Maya Lin

8. “To fly, we have to have resistance. It’s all about turbulence. Reacting to images of wave patterns in fluid motion.”

— Maya Lin

9. “Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that’s true in any creative field.”

— Maya Lin

10. “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.”

— Maya Lin

11. “The role of art in society differs for every artist.”

— Maya Lin

12. “I’m not in a hurry to do a lot of projects. I am very resolved in each project I take on.”

— Maya Lin

13. “If you don’t remember history accurately, how can you learn?”

— Maya Lin

14. “It’s only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.”

— Maya Lin

15. “If we can’t face death, we’ll never overcome it. You have to look it straight in the eye. Then you can turn around and walk back out into the light.”

— Maya Lin

16. “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

17. “Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn’t predicate what you might do next.”

— Maya Lin

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “I didn’t have anyone to play with so I made up my own world.”

— Maya Lin

22. “If we forget what used to be, then we’ve lost an ability to really be sensitive to our surroundings.”

— Maya Lin

23. “Our lives are given meaning by our actions-accomplishments made while we are “here” that extend beyond our own time.”

— Maya Lin

24. “In art or architecture your project is only done when you say it’s done. If you want to rip it apart at the eleventh hour and start all over again, you never finish. I was one of those crazy creatures.”

— Maya Lin

25. “How we are using up our home, how we are living and polluting the planet is frightening. It was evident when I was a child. It’s more evident now.”

— Maya Lin

26. “It’s funny, as you live through something you’re not aware of it.”

— Maya Lin

27. “My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.”

— Maya Lin

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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.”

— Maya Lin

31. “I though about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over. A scar. The idea occurred to me there on the site. Take a knife and cut open the earth, and with time the grass would heal it. As if you cut open the rock and polished it.”

— Maya Lin

32. “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

33. “Growing up, I thought I was white. It didn’t occur to me I was Asian-American until I was studying abroad in Denmark and there was a little bit of prejudice.”

— Maya Lin

34. “The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.”

— Maya Lin

35. “The only thing that mattered was what you were to do in life, and it wasn’t about money. It was about teaching, or learning.”

— Maya Lin

36. “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

37. “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

38. “I cannot force a design; I do not see this process as being under my conscious control.”

— Maya Lin

39. “We were unusually brought up; there was no gender differentiation. I was never thought of as any less than my brother.”

— Maya Lin

40. “You have to have conviction and completely question everything and anything you do. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you know, the side of your brain that has the smarts won’t necessarily help you in making art.”

— Maya Lin

41. “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

42. “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.”

— Maya Lin

43. “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.”

— Maya Lin

44. “My grandfather, on my father’s side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar.”

— Maya Lin

45. “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

46. “Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.”

— Maya Lin

47. “For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.”

— Maya Lin

48. “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.”

— Maya Lin

49. “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

50. “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