Top 81 Quotes & Sayings by Maya Lin - Page 2

I like to think of my work as creating a private conversation with each person, no matter how public each work is and no matter how many people are present

To fly, we have to have resistance. It's all about turbulence. Reacting to images of wave patterns in fluid motion.

I think I've always had an activist stance, yet at the same time, the other side of me - and this is where some people just don't get it, or they'd prefer it if the work was a lot uglier, a lot louder - I have this personality where I just want to put something out that's a fact and then let you interpret it. It's almost as if you might barely notice it, you might walk right by it, but you have to pay attention.

war is not just a victory or loss ... People die.

I do not think you can find a reason for everything you make.

I do think the smaller-scale studio works have that incredible love of data crunching, whereas I would say the large-scale earthworks tend to be much more stripped-down. With the mappings, as connected as they are to a much more analytical idea, what's a map? And can I make a map about time? I think the first time was Hurricane Sandy, the flood plane; a moment in time, but indelibly marked on any of us who were in the city. Mapping time is something that I'm really interested in.

Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole.

You really can't function as a celebrity. Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an architect. I'm an artist. I make things.

I think I needed to really move past my first public work as memorialist, and be equally balanced. It's a bit unusual, to be working between the architecture, the art, and what I would say is a synthesis, the memorials - they're problem solving, but it's very symbolic. You get this triangle; I need to be balanced with those three. They're all equally a part of who I am. I love how different they are, and yet they're coming out the same thing, whatever it is.

I'm as much interested in the form-making as well as getting you to think about what we're doing to the world around us.

I always say I'm no different than a 19th-century landscape painter, it's just that we have these incredible tools to look at the Earth and look at the world around us differently.

I can't shout out, "Do this." I don't want to be prescriptive. I want to give you facts, and that's the way I've always operated, whether it's a historical fact or a scientific fact, and then you actually have to connect it in your brain.

To fly, we must have resistance.

We know under Nebraska there is an underground aquifer that is probably underneath the whole state, but what form does it take? I kind of want to focus on that, for almost political means, because we keep digging more wells. We're not replenishing, and we're having a crisis in water around the world. But how do you visualize it? I don't know, so I know what I want to study.

Competitions are what you do as a good exercise.

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.

Our lives are given meaning by our actions-accomplishments made while we are "here" that extend beyond our own time.

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

I always give the analogy of the Earth at Night picture, of 7.3 billion of us, right? And everyone says, "Well, that's population." Well, if you took the entire world's population and you lived at the density of Manhattan proper - not a bad place to live - how much space do 7.3 billion people take up? The state of Colorado. At which point I end my lectures, because I want you to be thinking ... is this really a question of population, or is this a question of land use and resource consumption? And let's face it, the top 1.3 billion of us are doing all the damage. Sorry.

If you don't remember history accurately, how can you learn?

I begin by imagining an artwork verbally. I try to describe in writing what the project is, what it is trying to do. I need to understand the artwork without giving it a specific materiality or solid form.