Quotes from Mario Puzo

A man's first duty is to keep himself alive. Then comes what everyone calls honor.

He claimed that 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.

Life is a comical business, and there is nothing funnier than love traveling through time.

If anything in this life is certain...if history has taught us anything, it's that you cn kill anyone.

what is written on paper affects history. But not life. Life is a different history.

if I can die saying, "Life is so beautiful," then nothing else is important.

Michael: Barzini will set me up through somebody close... that, supposedly, I won't suspect. Hagen: Somebody like me. Michael: You're Irish, they won't trust you. Hagen: I'm German-American. Michael: To them that's Irish.

The Don considered a use of threats the most foolish kind of exposure; the unleashing of anger without forethought as the most dangerous indulgence. No one had ever heard the Don utter a naked threat, no one had ever seen him in an uncontrollable rage. It was unthinkable.

Everything you do in life use percentage as your god.

We don't know if capital punishment is a deterrent, but we know that men we execute will not murder again.

None of us here want to see our children follow in our footsteps, it's too hard a life.

I believe in friendship and I'm willing to show my friendship first.

Jack Woltz: Now you listen to me, you smooth-talking son-of-a-bitch, let me lay it on the line for you and your boss, whoever he is! Johnny Fontane will never get that movie! I don't care how many dago guinea wop greaseball goombahs come out of the woodwork! Tom Hagen: I'm German-Irish. Jack Woltz: Well, let me tell you something, my kraut-mick friend, I'm gonna make so much trouble for you, you won t know what hit you! Tom Hagen: Mr. Woltz, I'm a lawyer. I have not threatened you.

Nothing was more calming, more conducive to pure reason, than the atmosphere of money.

A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a thousand men with guns.

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.

There are things that have to be done and you do them and you never talk about them.They can't be justified.You just do them.Then you forget it.

treachery can't be forgiven.

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. Since Johnny's father died, Mr. Corleone feels his responsibility even more deeply. As for trying you again, Mr. Corleone is much too sensitive. He never asks a second favor where he has been refused the first.

What would the world come to if people kept carrying grudges against all reason? That has been the cross of Sicily, where men are so busy with vendettas they have no time to earn bread for their families.

The world is what it is, and you are what you are.

Everyone is responsible for everything he does

It's all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it's personal as hell.

for Justice, we must go to Don Corleone.