Mario Puzo Quotes

Many young men started down a false path to their true destiny. Time and fortune usually set them aright.

I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.

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’. Or you have to make them say ‘no.’ You have to take time and trouble.

Accidents don’t happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.

Time erodes gratitude more quickly than it does beauty!

Never let anyone know what you are thinking.

We are all honorable men here, we do not have to give each other assurances as if we were lawyers.

Revenge is a dish that tastes best when served cold.

Why should I be afraid now? Strange men have come to kill me ever since I was twelve years old.

It was not perhaps the warmest friendship in the world, they would not send each other Christmas gift greetings, but they would not murder each other.

Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than the government. It is almost the equal of family.

I don’t trust society to protect us, I have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they managed to con a block of people to vote for them.

A man who is not a father to his children can never be a real man.

Truth telling and medicine just didn’t go together except in dire emergencies, if then.

A friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults.

Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.

A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.

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.

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

He should be careful. It’s dangerous to be an honest man.

Great men are not born great, they grow great.

Lawyers can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks.

He had long ago learned that society imposes insults that must be borne, comforted by the knowledge that in this world there comes a time when the most humble of men, if he keeps his eyes open, can take his revenge on the most powerful. It was this knowledge that prevented the Don from losing the humility all his friends admired in him.

Michael could never remember his father ever having uttered a word about death, as if the Don respected death too much to philosophize about it.

Yet, he thought, if I can die saying, “Life is so beautiful,” then nothing else is important. If i can believe in myself that much, nothing else matters.