Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Me and modesty don't mix.
I intend to stay dangerous.
I work from a subjective palette.
I didn't even know I had a legacy.
Scars are the price you pay for success.
The artistic world is one of high nuance.
Over time, you accumulate a lot of life material.
Worry is a funky luxury when a lot has to be done.
What some folks find funny, other folks find tragic.
Before me, music soundtracks were sort of afterthoughts.
If you look down a barrel of a gun... you don't forget it.
I'm too short to play basketball and too nervous to steal.
Directors love to do music, they've been doing that all along.
I'm pretty much a loner. That's not good, bad, or indifferent.
I really like to talk to people and to get their take on things.
Hollywood desires money but they could not stand the political content.
Music or sound in a film is a character as important as another character.
After 'Don't Play Us Cheap,' I got very busy with theater and Wall Street.
I went to a number of schools when I was a kid on the south side of Chicago.
Music is for theater like theater is for scripts. It's total: it's cyclical.
It wasn't really me who invented rap. I stole the idea from Aristide Bruant.
A bumblebee can't fly. He's aerodynamically unsound. But he doesn't know that.
Essentially, I'm, most of all, a writer. So, what makes people tick interests me.
Why not have fun, man? If I feel like doing something, I just go ahead and do it.
Whitey is uptight about offending blacks without really knowing what offends blacks.
'Sweetback' represented an economic tour de force because I had no partners; I own it.
If I was just a creator, I would still be back in the Lincoln annex in the Post Office.
If I had to find one characteristic that is most symbolic of me, I think I am tenacious.
Blacks had a huge role in settling the West, but you'd never know it from Western movies.
Our minds are not our friends when they realize we have work to do - they're our enemies.
In trying to cross over to the mainstream, some people stopped writing what they witnessed.
The graphic novel is a great form that can be used to marry the book format with the movie.
One day, I was sitting in a movie theater, and I said, 'What the hell? I can do better than that.'
My life and career is defined by the constant pursuit of new forms of culture and self-expression.
Blacks are tired of seeing whites saying, 'I understand you.' You need a black to direct a black film.
In the morning, I get the paper. I look in the obituary column. If I don't see myself in there, I get up.
The studios didn't really take independent films seriously, till 'Sweetback' was such a financial success.
Somebody once asked me, 'Melvin, how'd you get to the top?' It was simple. Nobody would let me in at the bottom.
My first feature, I made in France. There's a great respect for the author there - they don't change your stuff.
I was a trader for a company. That's different from the brokers who we sort of disdain as sort of just errand boys.
Big publishers want you to change this and change that. I'd rather go to a little publisher - who needs the tsuris.
I make a film like I cook for friends. I hope they like it, but if they don't, I'm prepared to enjoy it all by myself.
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 don't consider myself a sociologist, I consider myself a filmmaker, among other things. Maybe an asshole but a filmmaker.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.'
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.