Best 33 quotes of Peter Benchley on MyQuotes

Fascinations breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Reputations rise and fall almost as regularly as the tides.

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

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.

The great fish moved silently through the night water.

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.

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

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

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

You're gonna need a bigger boat.

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?

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.

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

Life's full of chances to hurt yourself or someone else [...] In the next few days, you'll have more chances to hurt yourself than most men get in a lifetime. It's learning things and doing things right that make it worthwhile, make a man easy with himself. When I was young, nobody could tell me anything. I knew it all. It took a lot of mistakes to teach me that I didn't know goose shit from tapioca.

Suppose you fell over with this fish. Is there anything you could do? Sure. Pray. It'd be like falling out of an airplane without a parachute and hoping you'll land in a haystack. The only thing that'd save you would be God, and since He pushed you overboard in the first place, I wouldn't give a nickel for your chances.

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.

The fish might well have disappeared already, but Brody wasn't willing to gamble lives on the possibility: the odds might be good, but the stakes were prohibitively high.

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. It's depressing if you spend too much time reliving old joys. You think you'll never have anything as good again.

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.

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

What was it? What could it-- His last thought was surprise.

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