Top 65 Peter Benchley Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Peter Benchley

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

#2. 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.

Peter Benchley

#3. paper-pushers can't figure me out. all they understand is bullshit and politics, which amounts to the same thing.

Peter Benchley

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

Peter Benchley

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

Peter Benchley

#6. 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.

Peter Benchley

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

Peter Benchley

#8. Ellen Brody:
Wanna get drunk and fool around?

Brody:
Oh Yeah.

Peter Benchley

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

Peter Benchley

#10. Don't go into the water if you're bleeding - at all, from anything, anywhere on your body.

Peter Benchley

#11. 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.

Peter Benchley

#12. 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.

Peter Benchley

#13. Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth.

Peter Benchley

#14. Hooper ladled chum, which sounded to Brody, every time it hit the water, like diarrhea.

Peter Benchley

#15. 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.

Peter Benchley

#16. Intellectually, they knew a great deal. Practically, they chose to know almost nothing.

Peter Benchley

#17. We're going to need a bigger boat.

Peter Benchley

#18. 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.

Peter Benchley

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

Peter Benchley

#20. You're gonna need a bigger boat.

Peter Benchley

#21. 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.

Peter Benchley

#22. Sharks are like ax-murderers, Martin. People react to them with their guts. There's something crazy and evil and uncontrollable about them.

Peter Benchley

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

Peter Benchley

#24. 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.

Peter Benchley

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

Peter Benchley

#26. Look, Chief, you can't go off half-cocked looking for vengeance against a fish. That shark isn't evil. It's not a murderer. It's just obeying its own instincts. Trying to get retribution against a fish is crazy.

Peter Benchley

#27. 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.

Peter Benchley

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

Peter Benchley

#29. One of the few advantages man has over other animals is the ability to choose the way to bring on his own death. Food may well kill me, but it's also what has made life such a pleasure.

Peter Benchley

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

Peter Benchley

#31. 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.

Peter Benchley

#32. don't mind. I just thought you might not want to." The three men

Peter Benchley

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

Peter Benchley

#34. The fish was an enemy. It had come upon the community and killed two men, a woman, and a child. The people of Amity would demand the death of the fish. They would need to see it dead before they could feel secure enough to resume their normal lives.

Peter Benchley

#35. 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.

Peter Benchley

#36. The great fish moved silently through the night water.

Peter Benchley

#37. 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.

Peter Benchley

#38. till he'd tried it. You have to understand. 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 know fear. He might be cautious -

Peter Benchley

#39. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water ...

Peter Benchley

#40. 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.

Peter Benchley

#41. 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.

Peter Benchley

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

Peter Benchley

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

Peter Benchley

#44. God isn't going to scribble across the sky. The shark is gone.

Peter Benchley

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

Peter Benchley

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

Peter Benchley

#47. A quick, sharp laugh from Quint broke the thread of tension. "What a pair of
assholes," he said. "I seen that coming since you came aboard this morning.

Peter Benchley

#48. I dive as much as I can.

Peter Benchley

#49. What was it? What could it
His last thought was surprise.

Peter Benchley

#50. Fascinations breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival.

Peter Benchley

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

Peter Benchley

#52. 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.

Peter Benchley

#53. Come up fish. Come to Quint.

Peter Benchley

#54. 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.

Peter Benchley

#55. 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.

Peter Benchley

#56. 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.

Peter Benchley

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

Peter Benchley

#58. 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.

Peter Benchley

#59. mean anything." She seemed subdued, sad.

Peter Benchley

#60. 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.

Peter Benchley