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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
Idea
Terrified
Mine
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have. "
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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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" For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn. "
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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. "
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" 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. "
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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. "
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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. "
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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. "
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Vietnam War
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" I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It's what you learn, what you think. That's all that counts. "
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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. "
Maya Lin
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Me
" I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me. "
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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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You
Me
Deep
" 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. "
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Hurt
Think
Young
" 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. "
Maya Lin
Class
School
Person
" When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family. "
Maya Lin
China
Letters
Little
" 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
Studying
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" Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles. "
Maya Lin
Puzzles
Love
Me
" Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next. "
Maya Lin
You
Before
Guaranteed
" 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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Off
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Us
" 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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" 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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Time
" 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. "
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" 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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" I didn't have anyone to play with so I made up my own world. "
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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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Authority
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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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" 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. "
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Planet
Now