Peter Benchley Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't believe in blaming inanimate objects for anything.
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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.
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Twenty-five years ago nobody knew much about white sharks.
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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.
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Everything I've written is based on something that has happened to me or something that I know a great deal about.
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If you're young and wild, you tend to believe your clippings. One day you're Hemingway. The next day you're nothing.
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I don't think there's such a thing as an unprovoked shark attack.
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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.
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Without sharks, you take away the apex predator of the ocean, and you destroy the entire food chain.
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I guess I'm a hopeful optimist, because to be a pessimist is to be suicidal.
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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.
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Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline.
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Sharks don't target human beings, and they certainly don't hold grudges.
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I believe implicitly that every young man in the world is fascinated with either sharks or dinosaurs.
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I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don't think there's a single writer who influences me.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If man doesn't learn to treat the oceans and the rain forest with respect, man will become extinct.
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We should be afraid of sharks half as much as sharks should be afraid of us.