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Jack Woltz: Now you listen to me, you smooth-talking son-of-a-bitch, let me lay it on the line for you and your boss, whoever he is! Johnny Fontane will never get that movie! I don't care how many dago guinea wop greaseball goombahs come out of the woodwork!
Tom Hagen: I'm German-Irish.
Jack Woltz: Well, let me tell you something, my kraut-mick friend, I'm gonna make so much trouble for you, you won t know what hit you!
Tom Hagen: Mr. Woltz, I'm a lawyer. I have not threatened you.
”
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Mario Puzo (The Godfather (The Godfather, #1))
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And you need to stop binging on Goodfellas and the Godfather movies. Despite your belief to the contrary, our pack is not the Mafia with fur.” She paused, then added, “That’s another pack, completely.
”
”
Zelda Knight (Fated and Claimed)
“
Why would you be my friend? What do you get out of it?”
I consider that question as I sip from the bottle of rum, sitting back down in my chair. “The truth?”
“Please.”
“I’m bored,” I admit. “I came to the city because of a movie, too. The Godfather. But reality? It’s nothing like it is in the movies. Most days we just sit around, waiting for something to happen. It’s monotonous. The world, it’s all in black and white, but you? You’re so many shades of red, woman, and color me curious, but I find myself not so bored with your bullshit around.
”
”
J.M. Darhower (Menace (Scarlet Scars, #1))
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Looking back, I wonder why a gangster movie kidnapped my life. The Godfather had nothing to do with me. I was a feminist, not Italian, and I went to school at Montana State. I had never set foot in New York, thought ravioli came only in a can, and wasn't blind to the fact that all the women in the film were either virgins, mothers, whores, or Diane Keaton.
”
”
Sarah Vowell
“
Gangsta comes in many forms. You can watch a movie like Die Hard, which is full of violence that’s in your face. But if you watch a movie like The Godfather, the violence is subtle—it’s in a word, a nod, a gesture. I think you walk out of Die Hard and leave something in the theater. With Godfather, you walk out with something put in you. Hip-hop is the same way.
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”
The RZA (The Tao of Wu)
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@mink: Guess what I got in the mail today? A brand-new copy of The Philadelphia Story.
@alex: Nice! Love that movie. We should watch that together sometime if I can find a copy.
@mink: Definitely. It’s one of my favorite Cary Grant/Katharine Hepburn films!
@alex: Well, in other good news, since I know you LOVE gangster movies so much [insert sarcasm here], I just sent you a ton of Godfather screens with Alex-ified captions, changing things up for you.
@mink: I’m looking at them right now. You think you’re pretty funny, don’t you?
@alex: Only if you do.
@mink: You made orange juice go up my nose.
@alex: That’s all I ever wanted, Mink.
”
”
Jenn Bennett (Alex, Approximately)
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Sometimes I’d see a movie in a private screening room. No fun. People took phone calls and messages while watching. Made jokes, talked. When I go to a movie I’m a true believer. Or I just walk out.
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”
Mario Puzo (The Making of the Godfather)
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We used to be fun. Once we stayed up and watched all three Godfather movies in one night. We used to create themed drinks for, like, Presidents' Day. And it was perfect. It really was. But life is strange, always thinking this one thing is going to make you happy, because then you get it, and then maybe you're not as happy as you imagined you would be, because every day is still just every day. Like the happiness becomes so big, you have no choice but to live inside of it, until you can no longer see it or feel it. And so you start to fixate on something else- you want a child, and then the child is here, and that happiness is so big, it begins to feel like nothing. Like just the air around you.
Until it is gone, of course. Until you bury your wife or divorce your husband and then what? What do you do? Do you start all over again? Do you fixate on the new thing that you are sure is going to make you happy? How many times does a person do this over a lifetime? Is that just what life is?
”
”
Alison Espach (The Wedding People)
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I’m a big fan of Disney’s animated movies, or at least of most of them. I don’t know what it is, but the songs get stuck in my head. There is a Disney song for every situation you encounter in life. Some people quote The Godfather. Some quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I quote Walt Disney. Those are the true classics.
”
”
Judah Smith (Life Is _____.: God's Illogical Love Will Change Your Existence)
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If you find yourself in conversation with someone you know and that person brings up someone you both know and before he says another word you mutter, “That guy’s a fucking asshole,” you might be a little bitter. If you find yourself dismissing universally acclaimed landmark achievements, saying, for example, “The Godfather is an okay movie,” you might be bitter.
”
”
Marc Maron (Attempting Normal)
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I'd become convince that as long as there are immigrants and refugees in this world, the Godfather movies will live on. When I stressed this to Sakurai, she said, smiling, 'I don't know if I understand completely, but I know that you really love The Godfather, Sugihara.
”
”
Kazuki Kaneshiro (Go)
“
The Director’s Chair is with Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, etc.), and Robert refers later to this quote from Francis: “Failure is not necessarily durable. Remember that the things that they fire you for when you are young are the same things that they give lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.” ROBERT: “Even if I didn’t sell Mariachi, I would have learned so much by doing that project. That was the idea—I’m there to learn. I’m not there to win; I’m there to learn, because then I’ll win, eventually. . . . “You’ve got to be able to look at your failures and know that there’s a key to success in every failure. If you look through the ashes long enough, you’ll find something. I’ll give you one. Quentin [Tarantino] asked me, ‘Do you want to do one of these short films called Four Rooms [where each director can create the film of their choosing, but it has to be limited to a single hotel room, and include New Year’s Eve and a bellhop]?’ and my hand went up right away, instinctively. . . . “The movie bombed. In the ashes of that failure, I can find at least two keys of success. On the set when I was doing it, I had cast Antonio Banderas as the dad and had this cool little Mexican as his son. They looked really close together. Then I found the best actress I could find, this little half-Asian girl. She was amazing. I needed an Asian mom. I really wanted them to look like a family. It’s New Year’s Eve, because [it] was dictated by the script, so they’re all dressed in tuxedos. I was looking at Antonio and his Asian wife and thinking, ‘Wow, they look like this really cool, international spy couple. What if they were spies, and these two little kids, who can barely tie their shoes, didn’t know they were spies?’ I thought of that on the set of Four Rooms. There are four of those [Spy Kids movies] now and a TV series coming. “So that’s one. The other one was, after [Four Rooms] failed, I thought, ‘I still love short films.’ Anthologies never work. We shouldn’t have had four stories; it should have been three stories because that’s probably three acts, and it should just be the same director instead of different directors because we didn’t know what each person was doing. I’m going to try it again. Why on earth would I try it again, if I knew they didn’t work? Because you figured something out when you’re doing it the first time, and [the second attempt] was Sin City.” TIM: “Amazing.
”
”
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
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It’s a beautiful sunlit Monday in August, the kind of day that would make your heart sing, your spirit rise. It’s lunchtime, and I’m standing in an absent-minded fog by the German sausage stall in Borough Market, under London Bridge. I can hear the trains rumbling overhead, and it reminds me of that scene from The Godfather, the one where Michael Corleone is about to assassinate his father’s rival mafia boss. Trains always seem to rumble overhead in movies when something ominous is about to happen, and it’s kind of spooky, not to mention fitting, because things couldn’t get much more ominous for me, right now.
”
”
Ruth Mancini (Swimming Home (The Swimming Upstream Series #2))
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I got a stone in my shoe, Mr. Corleone,’ ” I said, quoting from the third Godfather movie.
”
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Joseph Finder (Vanished (Nick Heller, #1))
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By the time Google was telling Semel $1 billion, $3 billion, and then $6 billion, they had a plan. Now it was time to put that plan into action. It was time to go to the mattresses. At first, they called it Project Godfather. They called it that because, in the movie The Godfather, there’s a montage where, as Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone has his godson baptized in church, his hit men take out all of his family’s enemies at once. That was the plan Decker, Weiner, and Coppel had come up with for Yahoo. They were going to have Yahoo’s M&A team take out the entire search industry—except Google, of course—all at once.
”
”
Nicholas Carlson (Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!)
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There were many people killed in that movie, but everyone worries about the horse. It was the same on the set. When the head arrived, it upset crew members who are animal lovers, who like little doggies. What they didn’t know is that we got the head from a pet food manufacturer who slaughters two hundred horses a day just to feed those little doggies.
”
”
Jenny M. Jones (Annotated Godfather: The Complete Screenplay with Commentary on Every Scene, Interviews, and Little-Known Facts)
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Our No. 2 bottle, the 2012 Centopassi Argille di Tagghia Via, came from a region of northwestern Sicily more famous from pop culture than from wine, Corleone, the fictional ancestral home of Don Corleone of the “Godfather” movies. In fact, the wine comes from a group of cooperatives that cultivates land seized by the authorities from the Mafia.
”
”
Anonymous
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They got me glasses that were hip and cute, the kind adults like, but glasses are glasses. No kid has ever said: "Look at the hot new girl with the glasses. Maybe she'll have braces and a clubfoot too!" I think it made me cautious about other kids, because I was always one screwup from becoming "Four Eyes" on the playground. Those were the facts, like a card hand you couldn't fold. But beauty wasn't everything. I could still be the kind of girl who beat a table full of movie stars at poker. If I couldn't be datable, I could at least be respected. I was like the lady Godfather of plain-girl self-awareness.
”
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Alison Umminger (American Girls)
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Babe got his five minutes of fame—he was an extra in the Holland episode, a scene in Eindhoven. He's sitting at a table with a hat on, watching the action. He thinks he's a big shot now. I want to get in one of those Al Capone movies. Or be in Godfather Ten.
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William Guarnere (Brothers In Battle, Best of Friends)
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SAM WASSON: But The Godfather was a startling example of smart distribution, blockbuster distribution, an essential element in the burgeoning equation of how to assemble, manufacture, and sell not just a movie, but a giant hit.
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Jeanine Basinger (Hollywood: The Oral History)
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The Godfather, A Place in the Sun, Dodsworth, Galaxy Quest--these are perfect films. They start with a simple premise and proceed logically, and inevitably, toward a conclusion both surprising and inevitable. [From the chapter "The Script."]
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David Mamet (Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business)
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Some people don’t even realize they’re bitter. If you don’t know whether you are or not, here’s a quick quiz you can give yourself. If you ever wake up in the morning and the first thing you say is “Oh, fuck, not again,” you might be a little bitter. If you find yourself in conversation with someone you know and that person brings up someone you both know and before he says another word you mutter, “That guy’s a fucking asshole,” you might be a little bitter. If you find yourself dismissing universally acclaimed landmark achievements, saying, for example, “The Godfather is an okay movie,” you might be bitter.
”
”
Marc Maron (Attempting Normal)
“
Teresa Giudice: Family is everything to me and so is loyalty. It’s like The Godfather. I’m so loyal. I’m loyal to a fault. If you don’t have loyalty, you have nothing. My brother and Melissa aren’t like that. In fact, I even asked Melissa once, “Did you ever watch the movie The Godfather?” She said, “No.” I said, “You should watch it. You should watch that.
”
”
Dave Quinn (Not All Diamonds and Rosé: The Inside Story of The Real Housewives from the People Who Lived It)
“
Training Day, What Women Want, Minority Report, The Godfather, Tootsie, and Blade Runner
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Jeff Kitchen (Writing a Great Movie: Key Tools for Successful Screenwriting)
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Famous temper like Sonny Corleone
Hidden agenda like Michael Corleone
I’m El Padrino like Vito Corleone
You're not a leader, you're Fredo Corleone
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Soroosh Shahrivar (Letter 19)
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No cannolis are mentioned in the book or shooting script, but Coppola included the detail from his memories of the particular white boxes of cannolis his own father would bring home after work. Richard Castellano, as Clemenza, made movie history by improvising the now famous utterance: “Take the cannoli.
”
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Jenny M. Jones (Annotated Godfather: The Complete Screenplay with Commentary on Every Scene, Interviews, and Little-Known Facts)