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

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

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

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

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.

- Maya Lin

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

- Maya Lin

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

- Maya Lin

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

Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next.

- Maya Lin

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

- Maya Lin

Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.

- Maya Lin

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

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

- Maya Lin

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

- Maya Lin

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

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

- Maya Lin

All my work is much more peaceful than I am.

- Maya Lin

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

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

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.

- Maya Lin