Maya Lin

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

All my work is much more peaceful than I am.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It terrified me to have an idea that was solely mine to be no longer a part of my mind, but totally public.