Peter Benchley

“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.”

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Fascinations breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”