Quotes from Peter Benchley

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.

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.

We should be afraid of sharks half as much as sharks should be afraid of us.

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

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

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.

Fascinations breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival.

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.

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

It's hard to care deeply for something that might turn on you and eat you.

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

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.

I dive as much as I can.

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

Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth.

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

Reputations rise and fall almost as regularly as the tides.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.