Novelists From New York State

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"If you have medicine that could change someone’s life, you are honor-bound to share it."

"You are not in competition with anyone else in life. You get to run your own race."

"You have a sacred duty to put your magic in the world. Your voice matters"

"And my biggest error starting out was being afraid to be genuinely myself and put myself out there."

"I don’t really believe in mistakes because our missteps are often our greatest teachers."

"I am living proof that you may be shy, introverted or maybe even a bit anxious and can still put your voice in the world. Your voice matters."

"He introduced Marbet as “project psychologist.” “I don’t believe in psychology,” Capelo said flatly. Marbet remain unruffled. “Even that based on physiology?” “If it’s based on chemistry, with replicable results from control experiments, then of course I believe in it. That’s science. Literary theories about the mind are not.” “Ah,” Marbet said. “Fairy tales, all. From Uncle Droselmeyer Freud to Lady Godiva Jennings, undressing some poor sap’s mind ‘consciousness layer’ by ‘consciousness layer.’ All for a large amount of money, of course.”"

"An enormous amount of behavior grows out of genetic imperatives."

"Do you always interfere in other people’s confrontations? Are you that most dangerous of all people, a peace-at-any-price meddler?"

"A conclusion is just the place where you got tired of thinking."

"But it would be anecdotal evidence only, undocumentable and, by definition, unrepeatable. Therefore, not science."

"That’s not a hypothesis, Lyle. That’s sheer speculation, expressed in gibberish. It says nothing."

"And wasn’t that a common pattern in human history! Greedy religious orders, wanting to keep power for themselves, using customs and myth and threats and murder to keep the people in line and then making them believe it was all for their own good so they wouldn’t challenge the supremacy of the priesthood. Some political thinker of a few centuries ago had nailed it exactly: “Religion is the opiate of the people.”"

"Cooperation was, in the long run, a more powerful evolutionary strategy than violence, once a species was high-tech."

"Judge not. No culture was better than another, no culture should be deemed in need of uplifting. Crap! It was the worst kind of moral laziness masquerading as cultural relativism."

"She regarded boredom as a moral failing, the mark of a mind insufficiently stocked to occupy itself."

"How to reasonably object to artificiality, when all of anthropology spotlighted how artificial all cultural institutions actually were?"

"In the military, it can be more fatal to admit you made a mistake than to actually make one."

"When you don’t know what you’re doing, Kaufman reflected, you can easily recycle from other efforts where you also didn’t know what you were doing."

"I would spend whole weeks trying to untangle the lush foliage of bribes, kickbacks, nepotism, pride, religion, and mañana that is business in South America."

"The real thing—that’s not what you want in the theater. Illusion, magic, imagination. What should have happened, not what did. Reality doesn’t make good theater."

"It takes two people to make a human tie. But only one to break it."

"Kaufman’s fault. He had not planned, had not seen far enough ahead. Failure of vision was a sin the universe did not forgive."

"By pure chance then, by pure chance now. Unfair. But he’d always known that was true of the universe."

"History isn’t morality."

"Amanda decided that if these people were God’s choice for instruments, then God was as crazy as Father Emil."

"Every single war ever fought anywhere had spawned shadow battles between the warring governments and their own citizens. Black markets, war profiteering, blockade runners, quislings, conscientious objectors, organized crime and its less organized siblings. False government contracts, false traveling papers, false bills of lading, false passenger lists, and, for the really sophisticated, falsifying deebee programs. All it took were contacts and money."

"She had to believe it; nothing else was bearable. Kaufman was looking at self-delusion in a character strong enough to elevate it to madness."

"Science should remain above politics, if it’s to do its job."

"Serious thinkers pointed out that humankind was scarcely ready to colonize the stars, having solved none of its problems at home."

"In the west, we believe we are the most progressive and socially just, but a lot of that is just a hopeful illusion."

"People understand that elders listen respectfully to everyone. There’s a place at their table for every person. But they know, too, that the elders have consistently been the best people to make important decisions. People are, therefore, comfortable deferring. Their dignity is not compromised, nor do they feel powerless or demeaned, because they are carrying out the decisions of the elders. They know the elders embody the wisdom of their ancestors, that without them they would never have gotten this far…"

"The peculiar thing that he said was, all of our chiefs die on the road. And what he was talking about was, we must all bear up and know that we will all pass away, but it's important to keep these things alive and to give your life to the protection of these ideals."

"I imagined in everybody I passed there was some story that they carried with them that would break your heart. So how could you have the temerity to approach that person and say, here's what's wrong with you?"

"I have found Mrs. Frances Fuller Victor during her arduous labors for a period of ten years in my library, a lady of cultivated mind, of ability and singular application; likewise her physical endurance was remarkable."

"Her public monument is the work of her pen in her labors as an historian; her abiding memorial, for all who knew her best, is her strenuous intellect, her singleness of purpose, her transparent affections, and aspiring mind."

"There should be always contemporaneous recorded history. It is my experience that little value attaches to any other evidence, and that confusion results from admitting hearsay testimony. My whole effort has been to weed out worthless authorities and to stamp out prejudices."

"The beautiful and favored region of the Northwest Coast is about to assume a commercial importance which is sure to stimulate inquiry concerning the matters herein treated of. I trust enough is contained between the covers of this book to induce the very curious to come and see."

"Doesn't a boy forever delight in making a girl cry? Whether it is his sister or cousin or school-fellow, he always has some little feminine victim to vent his mischievous propensities on, with a view to seeing her 'dissolved in tears'; when he adds insult to injury by denominating her a 'cry baby.'"

"If a dataline is running and there’s no one there to watch it, has anything really happened?"

"And that vulgar gold lamé upholstery giving me a rash. You can dispute taste but you can’t stop it."