screenwriters-from-new-york-city

"Nothing I have experienced prepared me for the very public and relentless implosion of my father’s life,"

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"The Mafia liked the book. They come out looking good. Of course, it's a romantic novel and the Mafia is romanticized."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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'."

"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."

"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."

"“And what is love, in the end?" Alabaster said. "Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else's journey through life?”"

"I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn't a reader yet has just not found the right book."

"Generally, the best art comes from people that are a bit alienated from the system. I think it’s that friction that actually leads to making good books or good games, and not just being like, I’m a company man, or something for that system."

"“The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”"

"We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on"

"Sometimes books don't find us until the right time."

"You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?"

"I believe in the possibility for real human connections in virtual spaces. I also believe that the virtual version of yourself might very well be the best and truest version of yourself...We don’t have to necessarily be the worst versions of ourselves behind the mask of an avatar, though it often seems as if we are. People think we have it all figured out in certain ways, but in fact we’re just babies and toddlers when it comes to all these issues. We haven’t figured out exactly the best way to be good citizens, good humans online yet, and that’s OK. Because all these things are really young."

"privacy gives you creative freedom."

"I myself am mixed race — my mother is Korean and my father is an American Jew — so I've always felt other. But I think what's a little bit amazing about books, again, is the way in which they can sort of transcend that to an extent. And I also wanted the world as I see it — and the world as I see it is a world that is increasingly [filled] with people [of] different ethnicities."

"I see gaming as having the possibility to be a profoundly empathetic experience. I think the idea of the gamer, like the capital-G Gamer, this kind of misogynist dude shouting insults at women, is antiquated and not true. If you look at it, there are so many people that have played games their entire lives, like myself, that don’t necessarily identify themselves as gamers in that sense...the idea that, again, the person who is a gamer is somebody who is less empathetic, less romantic, or less trying to seek human connection is sort of old fashioned or possibly just ignorant."

"I think the reason I liked gaming so much as a subject was because it has all the subjects in it—it’s a grand subject."

"We all live at that intersection of art and technology. That’s where games live, in a really easy way to see."

"Her stickly, muscly little body thrashes beside me every night .. even as I slipped my hand into my underwear .. I always pretended to hate it."

"Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying."

"Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn't resist"

"Three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds."

"I tried to have a child. Along the way, my body broke. My relationship did, too. In the process—because of it?"

"Whatever she wanted to watch on TV if she would just "relax on me.""

"One would think that making a film is an ; you're building this—it's not, it's . The best metaphor I know of is we make in [] and it takes forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. And that's what the process is."

"I think this is the greatest threat to our republic ever. Not the Depression, not World War II, not the Civil War. This is it … This moment of all these intersecting viruses, of novel coronaviruses and of racial injustice — [a] 402-year-old-virus. And it’s an age-old human virus of lying and misinformation and paranoia and conspiracy. This is the pill that will kill us unless we do something."

"Being an American means reckoning with a history fraught with violence and injustice. Ignoring that reality in favor of mythology is not only wrong but also dangerous. The dark chapters of American history have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and often the two are intertwined."

"I had Chavo Guerrero in mind a lot when I was writing this play…Chavo’s job was to make guys look better than they were, which meant he lost a lot. And he was so skilled at it that there weren’t a lot of guys who could play that same fall-guy role for him so that he could be the champion."

"If you’re a playwright who doesn’t want to do people-on-a-couch plays, there are not a lot of avenues…You can go and do television, or you can stay and fight with organizations that aren’t really equipped to support work by people of color or experiment with form."

"Television has lapped theater in a lot of storytelling techniques — realism, depth of character, complicated storytelling…What we have that’s different in the theater is the audience in the space with us. And I’m not interested in ignoring the space between us."

"…I realized that what I had been watching was a fairly remarkable hybrid storytelling form: part live theatrical event, part polished television production, part sports spectacular, part collaborative improvised dance — and so much more. It’s a art form that synthesizes tons of other art forms into what appears to be simple, mindless entertainment, and it’s fascinating…"

"Do you know how many times, when I was a kid, going to Europe, having a Frenchman try to get on my case about Vietnam. And that wasn't the problem, do you know what it was like to have other kids, other American students go, "yeah, it's pretty bad, in Vietnam, we should, yeah". And I'd be like, 'but, mhmm, French Indochina.' , and they'd be like, "Oh is that near Vietnam" (groans). We don't educate our young people, and then we send them out into the world, as ambassadors as lameness. So no, no world empire, I don't want to be responsible for the plumbing in Rwanda, but we do need to become as much of a student of them as they are of us. Because, here's the thing. Well, the problem with the global village, remember in the early 90's, with the term now, global village, well the problem with the global village is that a lot of people are waking up realizing that they are in the global villages ghetto. And now with media, we are broadcasting these images of our wealth, and our power, our society, and the people in the global village are looking up on the hill seeing that mansion, but we're not looking down into the slum, and we need to do that. There's just so many times you can drive slowly through the ghetto in a rich convertible before you get carjacked. So this is what I mean, we need to engage..."

"People say, "get us out of the UN, we don't need the UN", we invented the UN. This is us, we are the ones who founded the idea of nations working together, and I think that's something we need to do. And it's, it's messy, and it's really complicated, and there's going to be a lot of countries out there that expect us to clean up there mess, or just want to see us fall on (our) face. And they love that, which is what I think president Obama said brilliantly at the UN, when he basically said, "that ok". If I'm paraphrasing, I don't think he's ever said "ok" in his life, he's probably said "well". But basically he said, "look, for the last eight years you've been on our case about going it alone, you know, we're imperialists, we're hegemonic, we're going it alone, we're going it alone... Ok, we're not going it alone anymore, we're going to listen to you, but you better ante up and kick in. Because, you don't have the right to have an opinion, if you can't back it up. It's put up or shut up time". And I was so happy when he said that, and the way he handled the Latin (American) countries, when he was dealing with the crisis in Central America, the coups in Honduras. And he said, "the very same countries who accuse us of doing nothing, are also the same ones who accuse us of being imperialistic. You can't have it both ways.""

"If there's four Vietcong in a village with knives and punji sticks, we'll bring in a B-52. And I think, sometimes we need to learn to fight smarter instead of to fight richer. And this is what I mean, you know, education, "oh, education's expensive;" no it's not, books are cheap, (the) internet's cheap, we can fight smarter, we can learn. So, that's where resource-to-kill-ratio comes from."

"Ignorance was the enemy. Lies and superstition, misinformation, disinformation. Sometimes, no information at all. Ignorance killed billions of people. Ignorance caused the Zombie War. Imagine if we had known then what we know now. Imagine if the undead virus had been as understood as, say, tuberculosis was. Imagine if the world’s citizens, or at least those charged with protecting those citizens, had known exactly what they were facing. Ignorance was the real enemy, and cold, hard facts were the weapons. (Page 194-195)"

"The Allies had the resources, industry, and logistics of an entire planet. The Axis, on the other hand, had to depend on what scant assets they could scrape up within their borders. This time we were the Axis."

"Attack. When I first heard that word, my gut reaction was, "oh shit". Does that surprise you? Of course it does. You probably expected "the brass" to be just champing at that bit, all that blood and guts, "hold 'em by the nose while we kick 'em in the ass" crap. I don't know who created the stereotype hard-charging, dim-witted, high school football coach of a general officer. Maybe it was Hollywood, or the civilian press, or maybe we did it to ourselves, by allowing those insipid, egocentric clowns- the MacArthurs and Halseys and Curtis E. LeMays- to define our image to the rest of the country. Point is, that's the image of those in uniform, and it couldn't be further from the truth."

"The opening bombardment took out at least three-quarters of them. Only three-quarters."