Mario Puzo

Puzo (1972)

Mario Francis Puzo (October 15, 1920 – July 2, 1999) was an American author and screenwriter. He wrote 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.

Quotes

• The Mafia liked the book. They come out looking good. Of course, it's a romantic novel and the Mafia is romanticized.
  • The first interview he granted after the publication of The Godfather, quoted in Jacquin Sanders, 'Mario Puzo: Author of ‘The Godfather’', The News-Herald (March 18, 1970), p. 25

• I thought of it as a man's book. I have no idea why women like it, too. The book is an ironic commentary on romantic love. The whole concept of romantic love for women is very phony. They really don't want to be considered delicate vessels any more.
  • The first interview he granted after the publication of The Godfather, quoted in Jacquin Sanders, 'Mario Puzo: Author of ‘The Godfather’', The News-Herald (March 18, 1970), p. 25

• I think of Wall Street guys as the crookedest in the world... They're [judges] the most corrupt part of the system... [The Catholic Church is] the worst influence on all civilization — they're against everything.
  • The first interview he granted after the publication of The Godfather, quoted in Jacquin Sanders, 'Mario Puzo: Author of ‘The Godfather’', The News-Herald (March 18, 1970), p. 25

• I'm fascinated by the movies simply because it is an enormous machine for making money and no matter how badly they run it, it still makes money. It's the perfect industry to put your nephew in and your idiot cousin, because they'll be geniuses.
  • Quoted in Ivor Davis, 'Hollywood: still a money spinner', The Times (September 26, 1978), p. 21

• The horse's head in the producer's bed was totally my imagination. I made it up based on Sicilian folklore. In the old days, they would kill a man's favorite animal and hang it up as a warning.
  • Quoted in James Bone, '‘Godfather’ tale was based on Mob links', The Times (May 16, 1998), p. 4

Quotes about Mario Puzo

• There is brutality in abundance, but there is also a sickening justification and glorification of a detestable regime. Everything is brutal. Sex is abundant; it is not love, just animality, except in a few instances.
  • Review of The Godfather in America (May 1969), quoted in James Thomas Chiampi, 'Resurrecting The Godfather', MELUS, Vol. 5, No. 4, New Writers and New Insights (Winter 1978), p. 18

• This is a big, turbulent, highly entertaining novel with ingredients that should assure it a place on the bestseller lists: ample sex, a veritable orgy of bloodshed in many exotic forms, and several characters titillatingly reminiscent of real-life public figures.
  • Pete Axthelm, review of The Godfather, Newsweek (March 10, 1969), p. 102, quoted in James Thomas Chiampi, 'Resurrecting The Godfather', MELUS, Vol. 5, No. 4, New Writers and New Insights (Winter 1978), p. 19

• I try to read The Godfather by Mario Puzo every year. It's such a terrific book. I feel it really says something about America.
  • Jackie Collins, 'My Perfect Weekend', Weekend Times (December 7, 1991), p. 18

• If anyone wants to know about the power of the Mafia—its ruthlessness, its immunity to prosecution—read The Godfather; Mario Puzo's brawling, irresistible tale brings the reality home more vividly and realistically than the drier stuff of fact ever can.
  The Godfather is loaded with the kind of sexual scenes, plots and counter-plots, murder and gore that seem to be requirements for a novel today. All of this might well have made it a work of cheap sensationalism, but The Godfather is deeply imbedded in reality, and this sense of reality pervades the torrent of unending action.
  • Fred J. Cook, 'Power of the Mafia', The Nation (June 16, 1969), p. 771

• Even though I am hurt that Mario Puzo had to write a novel as potentially defaming to Italian Americans as The Godfather, I admit that every page of it touches me in a way that Tom Sawyer could never do. While I can find much to identify with in Mark Twain's writings, Puzo's characters are so real to me that I am almost embarrassed to read about them.
  • Robert J. Di Pietro, 'Language, Culture and the Specialist in Ethnic Literature', MELUS, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 1977), p. 2

• [The Godfather is] bound to be hugely successful, and not simply because the Mafia is in the news. Mr. Puzo's novel is a voyeur's dream, a skillful fantasy of violent personal power without consequences. The victims of the Corleone 'family' are hoods, or corrupt cops—nobody you or I would actually want to know. Just business, as Don Vito would say, not personal. You never glimpse regular people in the book, let alone meet them, so there is no opportunity to sympathize with anyone but the old patriarch, as he makes the world safe for his beloved 'family'.
  • Roger Jellinek, 'Just Business, Not Personal', The New York Times (March 4, 1969)

• Here is all the classic material of Mafia mythology, which is exactly how Puzo treats his story. As an author he is the epitome of omniscience, narrating his tale like an old man telling stories of the "good old days" around a Sicilian hearth, in clear, simple prose... Right up to the end, it seems, Puzo never lost his sneaking desire to believe in a pastoral paradise governed by harsh but fair feudal robber barons – as realistic a myth as any.
  • Peter Millar, 'Don and on', Metro (May 27 – June 2, 2000), p. 22
  • A review of Omertà

• Mario Puzo is not the best novelist in the world, nor the most sensitive, nor certainly the most realistic. But he is without doubt one of the most ambitious.
  In "The Godfather," Puzo sets himself two excruciatingly difficult tasks: to humanize the Mafia and to make a fortune. He succeeded on both counts.
  Somehow, Puzo has managed to make his fictional Mafia overlord into a kindly, somewhat puritanical old gentleman with moral scruples about the drug business — and to make himself (Puzo) a cool three-quarters of a million dollars in the process...
  It was all done with mirrors — and some of the most readable writing since the well-plotted novel went out of style.
  • Jacquin Sanders, 'Mario Puzo: Author of ‘The Godfather’', The News-Herald (March 18, 1970), p. 25

• Puzo performs a neat trick; he makes Don Vito a sympathetic, rather appealing character... The deep strength of the narrative comes from...a conviction that street justice is more equal and more honest than the justice preached in the courts.
  • Dick Schaap, review of The Godfather, The New York Times (April 27, 1969), p. 34, quoted in James Thomas Chiampi, 'Resurrecting The Godfather', MELUS, Vol. 5, No. 4, New Writers and New Insights (Winter 1978), p. 20

• [Puzo] was clearly a writer of unusual talent and one looked forward to what he might come up with next... The Godfather is a brutal disappointment. It is quite simply, a package for bestsellerdom: huge, vulgar and sensational, it has all the formula requirements.
  • 'Packaged for Gluesville', review of The Godfather, The Times Literary Supplement, 24 (1969), p. 808, quoted in Jane A. Bowden (ed.), Contemporary Authors, Volumes 65–68 (1977), p. 474

• Never mind that they ought to know better by now. They're reviewing the money again and not the book. This time it's...a knowing, muscular, many charactered, and—what's worse—absolutely readable New York folk-tale about the Mafia. Granted, The Godfather does ask for it in a way, with almost $500,000 in advance from hardcover, paperback and movie rights; consider what book reviews usually pay and you'll see why a book like this so easily brings out the worst sort of moral indignation in so many critics... He's got to be just another literary crapshooter who's made the Big Killing overnight.
  The trouble with all that, of course, is that "overnight" happened to be 20 years. During that time, Puzo wrote three books in which he painstakingly and shrewdly set his wit to mastering about as much as a man needs to know about the craft of writing fiction. With his second novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, he had, in fact, nailed down a solid name for himself as a good but little known (and therefore uncorrupted, right?) chronicler of Italian-American life.
  Now Puzo is making money from his writing. So naturally he's only writing in order to make money. You don't have to be a Sicilian to enjoy a vendetta.
  • Gerald Walker, 'Crime Pays But So Do Criminals', New York (March 31, 1969), p. 58