Mario Puzo Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

Santino, never let anyone outside the family know what you are thinking. Never let them know what you have under your fingernails. I think your brain is going soft from all that comedy you play with that young girl. Stop it and pay attention to business. Now get out of my sight.

Mario Puzo
There was no greater natural advantage in life than having an enemy overestimate your faults, unless it was to have a friend underestimate your virtues.

Mario Puzo
Michael could never remember his father ever having uttered a word about death, as if the Don respected death too much to philosophize about it.

Mario Puzo
Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than the government. It is almost the equal of family.

Mario Puzo
Never sell your book to the movies until after it is published.

Mario Puzo
We are a family, and the loyalty of the family must come before anything and everyone else. For if we honor that commitment, we will never be vanquished — but if we falter in that loyalty we will all be condemned.

Mario Puzo
Never show your stuff to anybody. You can get inhibited.

Mario Puzo
Even as a young man, Vito Corleone became known as a "man of reasonableness." He never uttered a threat. He always used logic that proved to be irresistible. He always made certain that the other fellow got his share of profit. Nobody lost. He did this, of course, by obvious means. Like many businessmen of genius he learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient. And so he simply set about achieving that efficient monopoly.

Mario Puzo
A degenerate gambler. That is a man who gambled simply to gamble and must lose. As a hero who goes to war must die. Show me a gambler and I'll show you a loser, show me a hero and I'll show you a corpse.

Mario Puzo
What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.

Mario Puzo
Let us be separated by wars and pestilence, death, madness — but not by the passing of time.

Mario Puzo
She emptied her mind of all thought of herself, of her children, of all anger, of all rebellion, of all questions. Then with a profound and deeply willed desire to believe, to be heard, as she had done every day since the murder of Carlo Rizzi, she said the necessary prayers for the soul of Michael Corleone.

Mario Puzo
The man with the briefcase can steal more money than the man with the gun.

Mario Puzo
The fact of the matter is that I wanted to hold a grudge in some funny kind of way.Against everybody.

Mario Puzo
He had long ago learned that society imposes insults that must be borne, comforted by the knowledge that in this world there comes a time when the most humble of men, if he keeps his eyes open, can take his revenge on the most powerful. It was this knowledge that prevented the Don from losing the humility all his friends admired in him.

Mario Puzo
We are all honorable men here, we do not have to give each other assurances as if we were lawyers.

Mario Puzo