Top 80 Quotes & Sayings by Melvin Van Peebles
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Melvin Van Peebles.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
Me and modesty don't mix.
I've never been to film school. I had to leave this country to make a film. All they would let me do in Hollywood was be a messenger.
It wasn't really me who invented rap. I stole the idea from Aristide Bruant.
Truth of the matter is, I can't even read or write music.
Making 'Sweetback' took an exorbitant amount of energy and time.
With 'Sweetback,' I just put it together a little bit at a time. I didn't do it on anybody's grant. I did it like any other young executive - by cheating and stealing!
I'm pretty much a loner. That's not good, bad, or indifferent.
I said to my kids, 'Learn the business of America if you want to be an artist in America. The rest of that stuff, the art part, you could pick up in an hour and a half.'
If I had to find one characteristic that is most symbolic of me, I think I am tenacious.
If I was just a creator, I would still be back in the Lincoln annex in the Post Office.
Our minds are not our friends when they realize we have work to do - they're our enemies.
Blacks had a huge role in settling the West, but you'd never know it from Western movies.
I'm from the Southside of Chicago.
I used to be the third person in the secret jets we had - they were secret at the time - a jet bomber that flew at immense heights carrying atomic bombs.
Over time, you accumulate a lot of life material.
In trying to cross over to the mainstream, some people stopped writing what they witnessed.
What some folks find funny, other folks find tragic.
'Sweetback' represented an economic tour de force because I had no partners; I own it.
Whitey is uptight about offending blacks without really knowing what offends blacks.
Don't ask me something if you don't want to know. Because I will tell you.
If you give people something they want, they'll come and see it.
The artistic world is one of high nuance.
The key to empowerment is no more complicated than what Jesse Jackson said, 'We are somebody.' But the 'We are somebody' I would like to be in the larger sense: not just the urban African-American but homo sapiens in general - We are somebody.
When I was in the Air Force, if I walked into a restaurant, in about eight or nine minutes the M.P.'s would show up and drag me out because someone had called saying that someone was impersonating an officer.
I do what I want to do.
Scars are the price you pay for success.
I went to a number of schools when I was a kid on the south side of Chicago.
If you look down a barrel of a gun... you don't forget it.
I intend to stay dangerous.
My life and career is defined by the constant pursuit of new forms of culture and self-expression.
It must be horrible to do things that you don't like hoping to please other people, and they don't like it either, and you've got to eat it.
My first feature, I made in France. There's a great respect for the author there - they don't change your stuff.
I work from a subjective palette.
There is a downside to affordable technology, and that's mediocrity. I mean, just 'cause you can afford it don't mean you can do it.
Before I made 'Sweetback,' I had a three-picture deal with Columbia and enough juice, if I was real clever with it, to proclaim that I wanted to do an independent film.
Blacks are tired of seeing whites saying, 'I understand you.' You need a black to direct a black film.
I have no illusions about running. I hate running. If I could feel as good as I felt at 30 without running, I wouldn't do it, but that's not the way it works! So - no pain, no gain.
What happened when 'Sweetback' made all that money, the studios were in a very difficult position. They wanted the money, but they didn't the message. This marked the advent of the caricatures which became known as blaxploitation.
Big publishers want you to change this and change that. I'd rather go to a little publisher - who needs the tsuris.
The studios didn't really take independent films seriously, till 'Sweetback' was such a financial success.
As a navigator, I started studying astronomy because sometimes you're not able to use the equipment, so you'd have to do it the old-fashioned way, figuring out what you were seeing in the sky.
After 'Don't Play Us Cheap,' I got very busy with theater and Wall Street.
No one - black, white, or any different - walks away from a three-picture deal with a studio. That's every filmmaker's dream. But it wasn't mine.
You have to not let yourself believe you can't. Do what you can do within the framework of what you have, and don't look outside - look inside.
When we talk about 'Sweetback,' yes, it stars the whole black movement, but it's also the first time an independent film made that kind of money and was that successful and taken seriously.
I didn't even know I had a legacy.
You've got to really check on what you're doing: check and recheck it seven other times to be prepared. Sometimes, people get carried away with the artistic-ness of the endeavor and don't quite have their game face on when the time comes. It's always a pretty costly mistake.
A bumblebee can't fly. He's aerodynamically unsound. But he doesn't know that.
In the morning, I get the paper. I look in the obituary column. If I don't see myself in there, I get up.
Why not have fun, man? If I feel like doing something, I just go ahead and do it.
Many times, I get young people asking, 'What do you think about black movies?' And I say, 'What are you talking about? You mean Hollywood movies that have black people in them?' It's gone back to that, and that's not the same thing as a black movie.
One day, I was sitting in a movie theater, and I said, 'What the hell? I can do better than that.'
I graduated from college when I was 20. To get enough money to finish college, I went into the ROTC, and I was an officer in the Air Force before I could buy a drink.
Personally, I do movies the way I cook: I put in what I like in case nobody else likes it and I have to eat it for the rest of the week.
When I got to Paris, they welcomed me and showed my films. It was August of 1960, and I didn't have a penny in my pocket. But they had done something very dangerous: They had given me encouragement.
I walk down the street; the garbagemen will shout at me, and we'll talk. That's a pleasure when people feel, 'If he can do it, I can, too.'
I'm too short to play basketball and too nervous to steal.
I was getting my Ph.D. in Holland - I speak Dutch - for a number of years before I moved to France because I had one of those offers you couldn't turn down. They offered me to come and do my films.
I'm not a normal director. You can't look at me that way. What's kept me alive is my technical skill at doing other things.
The graphic novel is a great form that can be used to marry the book format with the movie.
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