Peter Benchley Quotes

Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They're six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I'm getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What's to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? Not lack of food. If there's enough down there to support whales, there's enough to support sharks that big. Just because we've never seen a hundred-foot white doesn't mean they couldn't exist. They'd have no reason to come to the surface. All their food would be way down in the deep. A dead one wouldn't float to shore, because they don't have flotation bladders. Can you imagine what a hundred-foot white would look like? Can you imagine what it could do, what kind of power it would have?It would be like a locomotive with a mouth full of butcher knives.

What had once seemed shallow and tedious now loomed in memory like paradise.

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

...pot roast. It could be reheated. It might
taste like a sneaker, but it would be warm.

Hooper ladled chum, which sounded to Brody, every time it hit the water, like diarrhea.

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

The great fish moved silently through the night water.

I dive as much as I can.

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

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

It was a funny thing, he thought, that when you live all your life in a place, you almost never do the things that tourists go there to do - like walk on the beach or go swimming in the ocean. He couldn't remember the last time he went swimming. He wasn't even sure he still owned a bathing suit. It was like something he had heard about New York - that half the people who live in the city never go to the top of the Empire State Building or visit the Statue of Liberty.

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

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.

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.

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.'

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

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

He felt at once betrayed and betrayer, deceived and deceiver. He was a criminal forced into crime, an unwilling whore.

God isn't going to scribble across the sky. The shark is gone.

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

paper-pushers can't figure me out. all they understand is bullshit and politics, which amounts to the same thing.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Don't go into the water if you're bleeding - at all, from anything, anywhere on your body.

You could start now, and spend another forty years learning about the sea without running out of new things to know.

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.

Maybe. Maybe not. Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They're six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I'm getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What's to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be?

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.

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.

We're going to need a bigger boat.

To fantasies', he said. 'Tell me about yours.' His eyes were a bright, liquid blue, and his lips were parted in a half smile.

Brody felt a shimmy of fear skitter up his back. He was a very poor swimmer, and the prospect of being on top of - let alone in - water above his head give him what his mother used to call the wimwams: sweaty palms, a persistent need to swallow, and a ache in his stomach - essentially the sensation some people feel about flying. In Brody's dreams, deep water was populated by slimy, savage things that rose from below and shredded his flesh, by demons that cackled and moaned.

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.

Life's full of chances to hurt yourself or someone else.

Come up fish. Come to Quint.

ideologues of every stripe, as well as folks with interests economic, political, or personal, can interpret data and statistics to suit their own purposes...

wherever they live, travel, hike, swim, fish, dive, kayak, or trek, they risk being confronted by something capable of doing them in with tooth, fang, claw, jaw, or stinger, and yet there is no public clamor to eradicate any animal because of the peril it poses to the human population. australians have learned to coexist in relative peace with nearly everything, and when occasionally a human life is lost to an animal, the public usually reacts philosophically.

odds might be good, but the stakes were prohibitively high. He

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

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.

He awoke at five, to the whine of the television test pattern, turned off the set, and listened for the wind. It had moderated and seemed to be coming from a different quarter, but it still carried rain. He debated calling Quint, but thought, no, no use: we'll be going even if this blows up into a gale. He went upstairs and quietly dressed. Before he left the bedroom, he looked at Ellen, who had a frown on her sleeping face. "I do love you, you know," he whispered, and he kissed her brow. He started down the stairs and then, impulsively, went and looked in the boys' bedrooms. They were all asleep.

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.

A quick, sharp laugh from Quint broke the thread of tension. "What a pair of
assholes," he said. "I seen that coming since you came aboard this morning.

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

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

A man dies, girl, he isn't any more, least not down here. Respect and all that crap doesn't deserve the dead; it just makes the living feel better. The dead one, maybe he is somewhere else-- maybe all he needs to be somewhere else is to believe he will be somewhere else. I won't deny a man his belief, and I don't know any more'n you about souls and all that stuff. But I know this: Speaking good or bad about something that isn't anymore is a bloody waste of time. I can't feature Saint Peter sitting up there saying: 'Hey, Adam, there's folks bad-mouthing you down there. What'd you do to merit that?

Ellen Brody:
Wanna get drunk and fool around?

Brody:
Oh Yeah.

You're gonna need a bigger boat.

That's the only hitch in learning: it's humbling. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. Anyway, all that's a long way around saying that it's crazy to do things just to prove you can do 'em. The more you learn, the more you'll find yourself doing things you never thought you could do in a million years.

Fascinations breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival.

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

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