You know, it’s a funny thing. You can smoke yourself to death, drink yourself to death, work yourself to death, and even eat yourself to death. But that’s all acceptable. The only thing you can’t do medically is screw yourself to death, and yet that’s where they put all the obstacles.

— Mario Puzo

Mario Puzo Quotes

All Sicilians are good eaters, when there is food to be had, and one of the few jokes people dared to make about Don Croce was that he would rather eat well than kill an enemy.

— Mario Puzo

He used the Sicilian phrase of the Mafia, “Fari vagnari a pizzu.” Pizzu means the beak of any small bird such as a canary. The phrase itself was a demand for part of the loot.

— Mario Puzo

Ah, Sicily, Sicily, he thought, you destroy your best and bring them to dust.

— Mario Puzo

He reminded him that whatever sins were committed here on earth, no man must forget that eternal forgiveness awaited him if he were a proper Christian.

— Mario Puzo

The Cleveland syndicate, perhaps the most powerful of the strictly gambling operations in the United States, was represented by a sensitive-looking elderly man with gaunt features and snow-white hair. He was known, of course not to his face, as “the Jew” because he had surrounded himself with Jewish assistants rather than Sicilians. It was even rumored that he would have named a Jew as his Consigliere if he had dared.

— Mario Puzo

Christian forgiveness was a contemptible refuge of the coward.

— Mario Puzo

My only business is to save souls in danger of hell. What a man does is his own business.

— Mario Puzo

I was forty-five years old and tired of being an artist. Besides, I owed $20,000 to relatives, finance companies, banks and assorted bookmakers and shylocks. It was really time to grow up and sell out as Lenny Bruce once advised. So I told my editors ‘OK, I’ll write a book about the mafia, just give me some money to get started’.

— Mario Puzo

Mafia,” in Arabic, means a place of sanctuary, and the word took its place in the Sicilian language when the Saracens ruled the country in the tenth century.

— Mario Puzo

You cannot say ‘no’ to the people you love, not often. That’s the secret.

— Mario Puzo

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.

— Mario Puzo

But there were too many factions, too many special interests that conflicted.

— Mario Puzo

Like any other parent he wanted his children to go to better schools and mix with better companions.

— Mario Puzo

The mouth was not so much cruel as lifeless; thin, rubbery and the color of veal.

— Mario Puzo

After all, education is the key to a higher civilization.

— Mario Puzo

The two men, one so huge, one so tiny, left the cemetery together. Terraced gardens girdled the sides of the surrounding mountains with green ribbons, great white rocks gleamed, a tiny red hawk of Sicily rode down toward them on a shaft of sunlight.

— Mario Puzo

At this point Frisella, the barber, came out of his shop to join in the fun. Behind him was the Maresciallo, pompous and important, rubbing his smooth red face. He was the only man in Montelepre who had himself shaved every day.

— Mario Puzo

I asked god for a bike, but i know god doesn’t work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.

— Mario Puzo

The promised reward of heaven is too far away, men must have some pleasure now. God will forgive them.

— Mario Puzo

Any profession was worthy of respect to men who for centuries earned bread by the sweat of their brows.

— Mario Puzo
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