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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

I probably have fundamentally antisocial tendencies. I never took one extracurricular activity. I just failed utterly at that level. Part of me still rebels against that.

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

It was a requirement by the veterans to list the 57,000 names. We're reaching a time that we'll acknowledge the individual in a war on a national level.

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

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 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.

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.

The role of art in society differs for every artist.

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

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

If we can't face death, we'll never overcome it. You have to look it straight in the eye. Then you can turn around and walk back out into the light.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

To fly we have to have resistance.

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.

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.

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.

All my work is much more peaceful than I am.

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

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 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.

Every memorial in its time has a different goal.

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

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.

Warmth isn't what minimalists are thought to have.

When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family.

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

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

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

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.

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

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