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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The role of art in society differs for every artist.

We were unusually brought up; there was no gender differentiation. I was never thought of as any less than my brother.

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

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

You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.

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.

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.

My goal is to strip things down so that you need just the right amount of words or shape to convey what you need to convey. I like editing. I like it very tight.

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.

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.

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 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.