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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. "

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" 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

Off

Better

" 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. "

" 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. "

" You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it. "

" Every memorial in its time has a different goal. "

" 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. "

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

Maya Lin

Any

Never

" 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. "

" It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it. "

" OK, it was black, it was below grade, I was female, Asian American, young, too young to have served. Yet I think none of the opposition in that sense hurt me. "

" I probably have fundamentally antisocial tendencies. I never took one extracurricular activity. I just failed utterly at that level. Part of me still rebels against that. "

Maya Lin

Against

Level

" I'm not in a hurry to do a lot of projects. I am very resolved in each project I take on. "

Maya Lin

Take

Projects

" The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical. "

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

" 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

Architecture

Art

" Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think. "

" 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. "

" You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down. "

Maya Lin

You

Deep

" I loved school. I studied like crazy. I was a Class A nerd. "

Maya Lin

Crazy

School

" To fly we have to have resistance. "

Maya Lin

Fly

Resistance

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me. "

Maya Lin

Art

Looking

" It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like. "

" Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles. "

Maya Lin

Puzzles

Love

" 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. "

" 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. "

" For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn. "

" I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It's what you learn, what you think. That's all that counts. "