Melvin Van Peebles

“Big publishers want you to change this and change that. I'd rather go to a little publisher - who needs the tsuris.”

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

“Me and modesty don't mix.”

“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.”

“I'm too short to play basketball and too nervous to steal.”

“I'm from the Southside of Chicago.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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'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.”

“'Sweetback' represented an economic tour de force because I had no partners; I own it.”

“I'm pretty much a loner. That's not good, bad, or indifferent.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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