Peter Benchley Quotes

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

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

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.

The great fish moved silently through the night water.

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

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.

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

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

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 dive as much as I can.

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

Fascinations breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival.

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

You're gonna need a bigger boat.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Reputations rise and fall almost as regularly as the tides.

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.

Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth.

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

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

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.

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

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