MAYA LIN

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I loved school. I studied like crazy. I was a Class A nerd.

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.

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

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.

My grandfather, on my father's side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

All my work is much more peaceful than I am.

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.

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.