Melvin Van Peebles Quotes

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.

Sometimes I have problems where I get into a mode where even just looking at a page on a screen makes me panic. And getting past that is a really intense thing to do.

I've learned how my own perfectionism can cripple me.

I know what it’s like to be distracted. To seek out distractions. To exhaust yourself doing every other little thing rather than face a blank page

I am lazy, but for some reason, I am so paranoid that I end up working hard.

My biggest enemy for the longest time was my head. When I first became successful, it made me anxious because I was overthinking everything, and you hear so many 'fail' stories.

The worst bullies you will ever encounter in your life are your own thoughts.

I used to second guess myself all the time. I can sit there and work in circles when I'm nervous about what I'm doing.

Some people thrive under pressure, but pressure can also ruin your performance, it can push you down angles which you don't want to go.

I'm a 24-hour tweet machine, I'm a 24-hour blogger. When there's no pressure on me, I can talk and write and lecture with the best of them. But put a deadline on me and I start getting writer's block.

I didn't hang any pictures in my office for a year because I thought that I would be jinxing myself and have to take them down the next day.

Every time I start a new piece of work, I spend a long while under the duvet thinking I can't do it.

I often obsess so much about things that I can't get done, that I ruin other things.

Lack of confidence - every time I start a new piece of work, it seems I have to spend a long while under the duvet thinking I can't do it.

People are never more insecure than when they become obsessed with their fears at the expense of their dreams.

'Bad' health, in a thousand different forms, is used as an excuse for failing to do what a person wants to do, failing to accept greater responsibilities, failing to make more money, failing to achieve success.

The thing you have to be on guard against, more than anything, is self-sabotage. You have to make sure you're not your own worst enemy.

I used to psyche myself out. Only, back then, we didn't know the word 'psyche.'

I have a very toxic combination of being completely determined, inflexible, controlling and being totally shy, guilty at hurting anyone's feelings, hypersensitive to other people's needs - and it's just paralysing.

You know how you get close to something you want and then you start doing things to ensure that you don't quite get it? I did a lot of that.

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.

Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work.

When you will, make a resolution, set your jaw, you are expressing an imaginative fear that you won't do the thing. If you knew you would do the thing, you would smile happily and set about it. And this fear (since the imagination is always creative) comes about presently and you slide down into the complete slump of several weeks or years - the very thing you dreaded and set your jaw against.

Procrastination is not Laziness", I tell him. "It is fear. Call it by its right name, and forgive yourself.

In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start.