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" It wasn't really me who invented rap. I stole the idea from Aristide Bruant. "

Melvin Van Peebles

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" 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

" 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

" If you look down a barrel of a gun... you don't forget it. "

Melvin Van Peebles

" 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. "

Melvin Van Peebles

" The graphic novel is a great form that can be used to marry the book format with the movie. "

Melvin Van Peebles

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

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

" If I was just a creator, I would still be back in the Lincoln annex in the Post Office. "

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

" Over time, you accumulate a lot of life material. "

Melvin Van Peebles

" What some folks find funny, other folks find tragic. "

Melvin Van Peebles

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

Melvin Van Peebles

" The studios didn't really take independent films seriously, till 'Sweetback' was such a financial success. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

Melvin Van Peebles

" I do what I want to do. "

Melvin Van Peebles

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

Melvin Van Peebles

" Our minds are not our friends when they realize we have work to do - they're our enemies. "

Melvin Van Peebles

" 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. "

Melvin Van Peebles

" 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. "

Melvin Van Peebles

" 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. "

Melvin Van Peebles

" I went to a number of schools when I was a kid on the south side of Chicago. "

Melvin Van Peebles

" Somebody once asked me, 'Melvin, how'd you get to the top?' It was simple. Nobody would let me in at the bottom. "

Melvin Van Peebles

" 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

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

Melvin Van Peebles

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

Melvin Van Peebles

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

Melvin Van Peebles

" After 'Don't Play Us Cheap,' I got very busy with theater and Wall Street. "

Melvin Van Peebles

" 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. "

Melvin Van Peebles