Mario Gianluigi Puzo was an American author, screenwriter, and journalist of Italian descent. He is known for his crime novels about the Italian-American Mafia and Sicilian Mafia, most notably The Godfather (1969), which he later co-adapted into a film trilogy directed by Francis Ford Coppola. He received the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the first film in 1972 and for Part II in 1974. Puzo also wrote the original screenplay for the 1978 Superman film and its 1980 sequel. His final novel, The Family, was released posthumously in 2001. These Mario Puzo quotes will motivate you.
Best Mario Puzo Quotes
- “The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, lies in its loyalty to each other.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “What is past is past. never go back. Not for excuses. Not for justification, not for happiness. You are what you are, the world is what it is.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “A friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults” ~ Mario Puzo
- “When I was young, some women told me they loved me for my long eyelashes. I accepted. Later it was for my wit. Then for my power and money. Then for my talent. Then for my mind-deep. OK, I can handle all of it. The only woman who scares me is the one who loves me for myself alone. I have plans for her. I have poisons and daggers and dark graves in caves to hide her head. She can’t be allowed to live. Especially if she’s sexually faithful and never lies and always puts me ahead of everything and everyone.” ~ Mario Puzo
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“Great men are not born great, they grow great . . .” ~ Mario Puzo
- “I don’t trust society to protect us, I have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they managed to con a block of people to vote for them.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Behind every successful fortune;There is Crime.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “The only wealth in this world is children, more than all the money, power on earth.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “There are things that have to be done and you do them and you don’t talk about them. You don’t try to justify them. They can’t be justified. You just do them. Then you forget them.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Many young men started down a false path to their true destiny. Time and fortune usually set them aright.” ~ Mario Puzo
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“Not having to worry about money is almost like not having to worry about dying.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.” ~ 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 get angry. Never make a threat. Reason with people.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than the government. It is almost the equal of family.- Don Corleone” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Love is like the little red toy wagon you get for your Christmas or your sixth birthday. It makes you deliriously happy and you just can’t leave it alone. But sooner or later the wheels come off. Then you leave it in a corner and forget it. Falling in love is great. Being in love is a disaster” ~ 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.” ~ Mario Puzo
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“In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Do you believe a man can truly love a woman and constantly betray her?Never mind physically but betray her in his mind,in the very “poetry of his soul”.Well,it’s not easy but men do it all the time.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Actions defined a man; words were a fart in the wind” ~ Mario Puzo
- “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Accidents don’t happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.” ~ 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
- “Italians have a little joke, that the world is so hard a man must have two fathers to look after him, and that’s why they have godfathers.” ~ Mario Puzo
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“Power wears out those who do not have it.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Revenge is a dish that tastes best when served cold.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “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
- “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” ~ Mario Puzo
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“Friendship and money: oil and water.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “I have always believed helping your fellow man is profitable in every sense, personally and bottom line.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Never show anger at slight,Tell nothing.Earn Respect from everyone by deeds,not Words.Respect the members of your Blood Family.Gambling was Recreation,Not a way to earn a Living.Love your Father,your Mother, your Sister but beware of Loving any other Woman than your Wife.And a Wife was a woman who bore your Children.And once that happened to You,your Life was Forfeit to give them their daily bread” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Finance is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger.” ~ Mario Puzo
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“If anything in this life is certain…if history has taught us anything, it’s that you cn kill anyone.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “He was 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
- “Gambling is not as destructive as war or as boring as pornography. It is not as immoral as business or as suicidal as watching television. And the percentages are better than religion.” ~ 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 quotes
- “You cannot say ‘no’ to the people you love, not often. That’s the secret. And then when you do, it has to sound like a ‘yes’. Or you have to make them say ‘no.’ You have to take time and trouble.” ~ Mario Puzo
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“Even the strongest man needs friends.” ~ 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
- “The truth now.He was disappointed in human beings.He had seen too many betrayals,too many pitiful weaknesses,too much greed for money and fame.The falseness between lovers,husbands and wifes,fathers,sons,mothers,daughters” ~ Mario Puzo
- “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
- “Oh, what a wicked world it is that drives a man to sin.” ~ Mario Puzo
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“Any man can turn traitor.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “We don’t know if capital punishment is a deterrent, but we know that men we execute will not murder again.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “It’s just business nothing personal.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Tell my father I wish to be his son.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “He smelled the garden, the yellow shield of light smote his eyes, and he whispered, “Life is so beautiful.” … Yes, he thought, if I can die saying, “Life is so beautiful,” then nothing else is important.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Life is like a box of Hand grenades,You never know what will blow you to kingdom come” ~ 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
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“Falling in love is great but being in love is a disaster” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Never let a domestic quarrel ruin a day’s writing. If you can’t start the day fresh, get rid of your wife.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “I find the only thing that really stands up, better than gambling, better than booze, better than women, is reading.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Why should I be afraid now? Strange men have come to kill me ever since I was twelve years old.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “It can be argued that man’s instinct to gamble is the only reason he is still not a monkey up in the trees.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Time erodes gratitude more quickly than it does beauty!” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Let us be separated by wars and pestilence, death, madness but not by the passing of time.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “And in that fraction of a second before anything actually happened, Santino Corleone knew he was a dead man.” ~ Mario Puzo
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“It was from this experience came his oft-repeated belief that every man has but one destiny.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “Some honorable men spend their whole life preparing for a supreme act of treachery” ~ Mario Puzo
- “It was not perhaps the warmest friendship in the world, they would not send each other Christmas gift greetings, but they would not murder each other.” ~ Mario Puzo
- “I want to tell you a story. I have no other vanity.” ~ 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
- “Power isn’t everything …its the only thing.” ~ Mario Puzo
