Words matter. These are the best Peter Benchley Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Twenty-five years ago nobody knew much about white sharks.
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.
Without sharks, you take away the apex predator of the ocean, and you destroy the entire food chain.
Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth.
It’s hard to care deeply for something that might turn on you and eat you.
If you’re young and wild, you tend to believe your clippings. One day you’re Hemingway. The next day you’re nothing.
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.
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.
I’m a babe in the woods when it comes to the Internet.
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.
We should be afraid of sharks half as much as sharks should be afraid of us.
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 believe implicitly that every young man in the world is fascinated with either sharks or dinosaurs.
Reputations rise and fall almost as regularly as the tides.
If man doesn’t learn to treat the oceans and the rain forest with respect, man will become extinct.
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.
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.
Fascinations breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival.
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.
I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don’t think there’s a single writer who influences me.
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.
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 dive as much as I can.
