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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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" 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. "

Maya Lin

Hurt

Think

Young

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

" 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 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

Always

Every Day

" Some artists want to confront. Some want to invoke thought. They're all necessary and they're all valid. "

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

Maya Lin

Puzzles

Love

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

Maya Lin

Authority

College

" 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. "

" The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I didn't have anyone to play with so I made up my own world. "

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

" 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

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

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

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

Maya Lin

You

Deep

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

Maya Lin

Art

Looking

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

" 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. "

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

" All my work is much more peaceful than I am. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "