Mario Puzo
Puzo was born in a poor family of Neapolitan immigrants living in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York. Many of his books draw heavily on this heritage. After graduating from the City College of New York, he joined the United States Army Air Forces in World War II. Due to his poor eyesight, the military did not let him undertake combat duties but made him a public relations officer stationed in Germany. In 1950, his first short story, The Last Christmas, was published in American Vanguard. After the war, he wrote his first book, The Dark Arena, which was published in 1955.
At periods in the 1950s and early 1960s, Puzo worked as a writer/editor for publisher Martin Goodman's Magazine Management Company. Puzo, along with other writers like Bruce Jay Friedman, worked for the company line of men's magazines, pulp titles like Male, True Action, and Swank. Under the pseudonym Mario Cleri, Puzo wrote World War II adventure features for True Action.
Puzo's most famous work, The Godfather, was first published in 1969 after he had heard anecdotes about Mafia organizations during his time in pulp journalism. He later said in an interview with Larry King that his principal motivation was to make money. He had already, after all, written two books that had received great reviews, yet had not amounted to much. As a government clerk with five children, he was looking to write something that would appeal to the masses. With a number one bestseller for months on the New York Times Best Seller List, Mario Puzo had found his target audience. The book was later developed into the film The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The movie received 11 Academy Award nominations, winning three, including an Oscar for Puzo for Best Adapted Screenplay. Coppola and Puzo collaborated then to work on sequels to the original film, The Godfather Part II and The Godfather Part III.
Puzo wrote the first draft of the script for the 1974 disaster film Earthquake, which he was unable to continue working on due to his commitment to The Godfather Part II. Puzo also co-wrote Richard Donner's Superman and the original draft for Superman II. He also collaborated on the stories for the 1982 film A Time to Die and the 1984 Francis Ford Coppola film The Cotton Club.
Puzo never saw the publication of his penultimate book, Omertà, but the manuscript was finished before his death, as was the manuscript for The Family. However, in a review originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Jules Siegel, who had worked closely with Puzo at Magazine Management Company, speculated that Omertà may have been completed by "some talentless hack." Siegel also acknowledges the temptation to "rationalize avoiding what is probably the correct analysis -- that [Puzo] wrote it and it is terrible."
Puzo died of heart failure on July 2, 1999 at his home in Bay Shore, Long Island, New York. His family now lives in East Islip, New York.
“My dear Guiliano," he said, "how is it that you and Don Croce do not join together to rule Sicily? He has the wisdom of age, you have the idealism of youth.”
“Preparing the communal evening meal sometimes caused arguments. Every village in Sicily had a different recipe for squid and eels, disagreed on what herbs should be disbarred from the tomato sauce. And whether sausages should ever be baked.”
“But let me say this. I am a superstitious man, a ridiculous failing but I must confess it here. And so if some unlucky accident should befall my youngest son, if some police officer should accidentally shoot him, if he should hang himself while in his jail cell, if new witnesses appear to testify to his guilt, my superstition will make me feel that it was the result of the ill will still borne me by some people here. Let me go further. If my son is struck by a bolt of lightning I will blame some of the people here. If his plane show fall into the sea or his ship sink beneath the waves of the ocean, if he should catch a mortal fever, if his automobile should be struck by a train, such is my superstition that I would blame the ill will felt by people here. Gentlemen, that ill will, that bad luck, I could never forgive. But aside from that let me swear by the souls of my grandchildren that I will never break the peace we have made. After all, are we or are we not better men than those pezzonovanti who have killed countless millions of men in our lifetimes?”
“Bet, ak vai, cik ļauna bija pasaule, kas lika cilvēkam grēkot.”
“Nekad neuztraucies par naudu. Domā par slavu.”
“Es rīkojos kā man ir vislabāk. Un vislabāk ir būt vienkāršam. Pavisam, pavisam vienkāršam. Un, kad vajag ko īpašu, tam jābūt pavisam, pavisam īpašam.”
“Vīriešiem sekss vajadzīgs, lai sagatavotos doties kaujā ar pašapziņu. Sievietēm sekss vajadzīgs zaudējuma bēdu remdēšanai vai kā daļa no uzvaras gandarījuma.”
“Viņas īstā dzīve bija lomas, ko viņa tēloja, viņa jutās dzīvāka, kad iedvesa dzīvību savos tēlos, nēsāja tos sevī, kamēr pati dzīvoja savu parasto dzīvi.”
“Bija prieks atkal pievērsties rakstīšanai ar galvu, kas skaidra no kokaīna un patiesas mīlestības.”
“A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a thousand men with guns.”
“I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.”
“If anything in this life is certain...if history has taught us anything, it's that you cn kill anyone.”
“The other Dons in the room applauded and rose to shake hands with everybody in sight and to congratulate Don Corleone and Don Tattaglia on their new friendship. 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. That was friendship enough in this world, all that was needed.”
“Everything you do in life use percentage as your god.”
“Time erodes gratitude more quickly than it does beauty!”
“Any man can turn traitor.”
“That's like bringing a guy up from the minors to pitch the World Series.”
“Tell my father I wish to be his son.”
“Lampone made a gesture that said he would be patient, knowing his reward was certain.”
“Yet, he thought, if I can die saying, "Life is so beautiful," then nothing else is important. If i can believe in myself that much, nothing else matters.”
“The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, lies in its loyalty to each other.”
“Some honorable men spend their whole life preparing for a supreme act of treachery”
“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.”
“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.”
“And in that fraction of a second before anything actually happened, Santino Corleone knew he was a dead man.”
“Lawyers can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks.”
“We don't know if capital punishment is a deterrent, but we know that men we execute will not murder again.”
“A man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A man who is not a father to his children can never be a real man,”
“In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns.”
“Life is Beautiful”
“Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.”
“Power isn't everything ...its the only thing.”
“Let us be separated by wars and pestilence, death, madness but not by the passing of time.”
“Fools die.”
“Falling in love is great but being in love is a disaster”
“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 goingsoft from all that comedy you play with that young girl. Stop it and pay attention tobusiness. Now get out of my sight.”
“Great men are not born great, they grow great . . .”
“Listen to me. I will tell you the truth about a man's life. I will tell you the truth about his love for women.”
“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.”
“The fact of the matter is that I wanted to hold a grudge in some funny kind of way.Against everybody.”
“Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.”
“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.”
“"But you're the toughest son of a b!&€# i've ever seen.You never let anybody get near you.You never let anybody know what you really think.”
“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.”
“Accidents don't happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.”
“Power wears out those who do not have it.”
“God seemed to be having a hard time killing him, and he'd be damned if he was going to make the job easy for mere mortals”