Mario Puzo

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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'."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."