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.

Melvin Van Peebles

Scars are the price you pay for success.

Melvin Van Peebles

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.

Melvin Van Peebles

Why not have fun, man? If I feel like doing something, I just go ahead and do it.

Melvin Van Peebles

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.

Melvin Van Peebles

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!

Melvin Van Peebles

One day, I was sitting in a movie theater, and I said, 'What the hell? I can do better than that.'

Melvin Van Peebles

Blacks had a huge role in settling the West, but you'd never know it from Western movies.

Melvin Van Peebles

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.

Melvin Van Peebles

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.

Melvin Van Peebles

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.'

Melvin Van Peebles

If I had to find one characteristic that is most symbolic of me, I think I am tenacious.

Melvin Van Peebles

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.'

Melvin Van Peebles

Making 'Sweetback' took an exorbitant amount of energy and time.

Melvin Van Peebles

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.

Melvin Van Peebles

In trying to cross over to the mainstream, some people stopped writing what they witnessed.

Melvin Van Peebles

I didn't even know I had a legacy.

Melvin Van Peebles

Truth of the matter is, I can't even read or write music.

Melvin Van Peebles

A bumblebee can't fly. He's aerodynamically unsound. But he doesn't know that.

Melvin Van Peebles

I do what I want to do.

Melvin Van Peebles

My first feature, I made in France. There's a great respect for the author there - they don't change your stuff.

Melvin Van Peebles