My Italian-American heritage, of which I'm very proud and with which I identify strongly, surfaces in several of my novels.
My family isn't really Italian. We're more like Olive Garden Italian.
I saw 'The Godfather' in London when it came out in 1972 and loved it. I've seen it probably 20 times - I always find something new.
I started cooking 30-something years ago. When I was 14, 15, I was a short-order cook in a snack bar. That was at a place called the Gran Centurions. It was an Italian-American swim club my parents belonged to.
There was certainly less profanity in the Godfather than in the Sopranos. There was a kind of respect. It's not that I totally agreed with it, but it was a great piece of art.
I'm very proud of being Italian-American, but people don't realize that the mafia is just this aberration. The real community is built on the working man, the guy who's the cop, the fireman, the truck driver, the bus driver.
...in the middle of Little Italy little did we know that we riddled some middleman who didn't do diddily
In New York, if you go into an Italian-American neighbourhood, the code of the streets is respect and reputation.
I lived in mafia neighborhoods off and on when I was a kid. If you were in Little Italy, in East Harlem, in Brooklyn... Those neighborhoods were, in those years, dominated by mafia families. You knew it and you felt it, you know?
The thing that attracts people to "The Sopranos" is the family element. It shows that America still has a longing for that traditional upbringing.
I grew up in Queens in N.Y., and in parts of my neighbourhood, there were a lot of Italian Americans and a lot of people who were either affiliated with nefarious people or had seen so many movies that they were embodying that.
Basically, the last 30 minutes of 'Goodfellas,' that was my neighborhood... literally. There were people on my street who did nothing but just wash their car all day and wait for a package, and that's what I thought being an adult was.
I learned when I was a student in Connecticut. I had an Italian-American teacher who gave me classes for a week, and then said, "Okay, you're ready." And I wasn't ready. I didn't know how to drive!. But he knew the policeman who gave the test. And that's how I got through.
The 'Godfather I' and 'II,' those were real straight movies in my life. At the same time, so is 'Five Deadly Venoms,' if we go into kung-fu movies.
I know Italians and I like them. A lot of my father's best friends were Italians.
In an Italian household, there were two figures for me growing up - you had the Pope and you had Frank Sinatra, and, of course, Tony Bennett. And not necessarily in that order.
I became a playwright and screenwriter. Italian-Americans were my particular specialty. I liked the way they talked. There was something free in it.
'The Godfather' has been a film which has influenced me a lot.
I grew up within Italian-American neighborhoods, everybody was coming into the house all the time, kids running around, that sort of stuff, so when I finally got into my own area, so to speak, to make films, I still carried on.
If I could spend the rest of my life inside one movie it would be The Godfather, because it's the greatest movie ever made.
I loved 'Life is Beautiful' and action films are great, like 'Die Hard.' My favourite is the mob film - 'Goodfellas,' 'The Godfather,' 'Once Upon a Time In America,' anything with Robert De Niro in it.
I'll tell you this: Tommy Morrison has a tattoo of Elvis Presley on his butt, he likes to hunt and fish, and his favorite movie is 'GoodFellas.'
I think Frankie Valli did everything right. He kept singing. And you also have to remember, he was confined to a certain society, which was this sort of like - the wrong side of the law kind of society of Italian guys from the streets of Belleville, New Jersey. So he found his way.
When I first came here, Italian food wasn't anything I recognized. I didn't know what Italian American food was; we never ate it at home. It was the food of immigrants who came here and made use of the ingredients they had.
I love the first Godfather movie, part one. And two.
