Making 'Sweetback' took an exorbitant amount of energy and time.
— Melvin Van Peebles
If you look down a barrel of a gun... you don't forget it.
Don't ask me something if you don't want to know. Because I will tell you.
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.'
I do what I want to do.
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.
I intend to stay dangerous.
I'm too short to play basketball and too nervous to steal.
Blacks had a huge role in settling the West, but you'd never know it from Western movies.
I didn't even know I had a legacy.
In trying to cross over to the mainstream, some people stopped writing what they witnessed.
Why not have fun, man? If I feel like doing something, I just go ahead and do it.
It wasn't really me who invented rap. I stole the idea from Aristide Bruant.
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.
