Peter Benchley Quotations

Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth.

Almost any shark, three or four feet long, could kill a human being if it chose to do it. It could make you bleed to death. But they don't.

If man doesn't learn to treat the oceans and the rain forest with respect, man will become extinct.

I hope that 'Jaws' will have brought sharks into the public interest at a time when we desperately need to reevaluate our care for the environment.

We provoke a shark every time we enter the water where sharks happen to be, for we forget: The ocean is not our territory - it's theirs.

I believe implicitly that every young man in the world is fascinated with either sharks or dinosaurs.

Without sharks, you take away the apex predator of the ocean, and you destroy the entire food chain

We do not just fear our predators, we are transfixed by them. We are prone to weave stories and fables and chat endlessly about them.

If we choose to walk into a forest where a tiger lives, we are taking a chance. If we swim in a river where crocodiles live, we are taking a chance. If we visit the desert or climb a mountain or enter a swamp where snakes have managed to survive, we are taking a chance.

A human being is still more likely to die of a bee sting, snake bite or, Lord knows, automobile accident than by shark attack. We do not execute the perpretrators of death by car. We should not butcher an animal for an inadvertent homicide.

I guess I'm a hopeful optimist, because to be a pessimist is to be suicidal.

It is not that I don't have a fear of sharks, it is that I have a respect for them, so that I know any more than if I were to go into the jungle, I would have a fear of tigers, that I would try to lower the odds.

If you take away the predators in the prairies and the national parks, you suddenly have an explosion of elk, and then you have a lack of the food source for the elk, so they strip all the ground bare and that takes away the cover, on and on and on and on. The whole food chain is disrupted.

Reputations rise and fall almost as regularly as the tides.

Since writing JAWS, I've been lucky enough to do close to forty television shows about wildlife in the oceans, and yes, I have been attacked by sea creatures once in a while.

I don't think there's such a thing as an unprovoked shark attack.

I didn't invent the fear of sharks; it's as old as mankind, and that - to take that responsibility would mean that Mario Puzo should take the blame for the Mafia.

We should be afraid of sharks half as much as sharks should be afraid of us.

Sharks don't target human beings, and they certainly don't hold grudges.

I don't believe in blaming inanimate objects for anything.

I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don't think there's a single writer who influences me.

If you're young and wild, you tend to believe your clippings. One day you're Hemingway. The next day you're nothing.

Twenty-five years ago nobody knew much about white sharks.

Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline.

We are already perilously close to killing off the top of the oceanic food chain - with catastrophic consequences that we can't begin to imagine. Let us not, in the heat of anger, reduce the already devastated population of great white sharks by one more member.

Ideas for stories come to me based on my life, so who knows? If somebody sends me to become an astronaut, that's what I'll end up writing.

Everything I've written is based on something that has happened to me or something that I know a great deal about.

You're much more likely to be attacked by lightning or by your own toilet than you are by a shark,

It's hard to care deeply for something that might turn on you and eat you.

There was a minor burst of macho nuttiness after 'Jaws' came out, in which people would go off in shark tournaments and come back holding the bloody heads of these animals and say, 'Look what I did.' But they've been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years anyway.

In a deeply tribal sense, we love our monsters, and I think that is the key to it right there. It is monsters; it is learning about them: it is both thrill and safety. You can think of them without being desperately afraid because they are not going to come into your living room and eat you. That is 'Jaws.'

Because the Asian market is so omnivorous, it affects all the shark populations up and down the Central and South American coast, and to a certain extent the East Coast of the United States as well.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...

Fascinations breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival.

I dive as much as I can.

He would have lied to himself as facilely as an alcoholic lies to himself to justify the 10 a.m. tumbler of vodka : it may be early here, but in Baghdad it's almost evening.

Look, Chief, you can't go off half-cocked looking for vengeance against a fish. That shark isn't evil. It's not a murderer. It's just obeying its own instincts. Trying to get retribution against a fish is crazy.

The great fish moved silently through the night water.

I'm a babe in the woods when it comes to the Internet.

I've never been hurt by a sea creature, except for jellyfish and sea urchins.

The fish was an enemy. It had come upon the community and killed two men, a woman, and a child. The people of Amity would demand the death of the fish. They would need to see it dead before they could feel secure enough to resume their normal lives.

You're gonna need a bigger boat.

Oceanography is a terrific career because gradually we seem to be coming around to realize that we had better become as acquainted with the seventy percent of our planet that is covered by water as we are with the dark side of the moon.

The ocean is the only alien and potentially hostile environment on the planet into which we tend to venture without thinking about the animals that live there, how they behave, how they support themselves, and how they perceive us. I know of no one who would set off into the jungles of Malaysia armed only with a bathing suit, a tube of suntan cream, and a book, and yet that's precisely how we approach the oceans.

Sharks have everything a scientist dreams of. They're beautiful―God, how beautiful they are! They're like an impossibly perfect piece of machinery. They're as graceful as any bird. They're as mysterious as any animal on earth. No one knows for sure how long they live or what impulses―except for hunger―they respond to. There are more than two hundred and fifty species of shark, and everyone is different from every other one.

I know now that the mythic monster I created was largely a fiction.

The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.

There's nothing in the sea this fish would fear. Other fish run from bigger things. That's their instinct. But this fish doesn't run from anything. He doesn't fear.

No, the shark in an updated JAWS could not be the villain; it would have to be written as the victim, for, worldwide, sharks are much more the oppressed than the oppressors.

The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail