Peter Benchley Quotes & Sayings

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

The boy's last - only - thought was that he had been punched in the stomach. The breath was driven from him in a sudden rush. He had no time to cry out, nor, had he had the time, would he have known what to cry, for he could not see the fish. The fish's head drove the raft out of the water. The jaws smashed together, engulfing head, arms, shoulders, trunk, pelvis, and most of the raft. Nearly half the fish had come clear of the water, and it slid forward and down in a belly-flopping motion, grinding the mass of flesh and bone and rubber. The boy's legs were severed at the hips, and they sank, spinning slowly, to the bottom. — Peter Benchley

Brody felt a shimmy of fear skitter up his back. He was a very poor swimmer, and the prospect of being on top of - let alone in - water above his head give him what his mother used to call the wimwams: sweaty palms, a persistent need to swallow, and a ache in his stomach - essentially the sensation some people feel about flying. In Brody's dreams, deep water was populated by slimy, savage things that rose from below and shredded his flesh, by demons that cackled and moaned. — Peter Benchley

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

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

What was it? What could it
His last thought was surprise. — Peter Benchley

I believe implicitly that every young man in the world is fascinated with either sharks or dinosaurs. — Peter Benchley

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water ... — Peter Benchley

What had once seemed shallow and tedious now loomed in memory like paradise. — Peter Benchley

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

odds might be good, but the stakes were prohibitively high. He — Peter Benchley

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

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

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

Hooper ladled chum, which sounded to Brody, every time it hit the water, like diarrhea. — Peter Benchley

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

In a deeply tribal sense, we love our monsters, and I think that is the key to it right there. It is monsters; it is learning about them: it is both thrill and safety. You can think of them without being desperately afraid because they are not going to come into your living room and eat you. That is 'Jaws.' — Peter Benchley

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

Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth. — Peter Benchley

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

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

Twenty-five years ago nobody knew much about white sharks. — Peter Benchley

We're going to need a bigger boat. — Peter Benchley

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

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

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

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

He felt at once betrayed and betrayer, deceived and deceiver. He was a criminal forced into crime, an unwilling whore. — Peter Benchley

At first, the woman thought she had snagged her leg on a rock or a piece of floating wood. There was no initial pain, only one violent tug on her right leg. She reached down to touch her foot, treading water with her left leg to keep her head up, feeling in the blackness with her left hand. She could not find her foot. She reached higher on her leg, and then she was overcome by a rush of nausea and dizziness. Her groping fingers had found a nub of bone and tattered flesh. She knew that the warm, pulsing flow over her fingers in the chill water was her own blood. — Peter Benchley

The great fish moved silently through the night water. — Peter Benchley

We should be afraid of sharks half as much as sharks should be afraid of us. — Peter Benchley

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

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

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

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

Intellectually, they knew a great deal. Practically, they chose to know almost nothing. — Peter Benchley

Reputations rise and fall almost as regularly as the tides. — Peter Benchley

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

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

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

The ocean is the only alien and potentially hostile environment on the planet into which we tend to venture without thinking about the animals that live there, how they behave, how they support themselves, and how they perceive us. I know of no one who would set off into the jungles of Malaysia armed only with a bathing suit, a tube of suntan cream, and a book, and yet that's precisely how we approach the oceans. — 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. — Peter Benchley

The young man was tall and slim. He wore sandals and a bathing suit and a short-sleeved shirt with an alligator emblem stitched to the left breast, which caused Brody to take an instant, instinctive dislike to the man. In his adolescence Brody had thought of those shirts as badges of wealth and position. All the summer people wore them. Brody badgered his mother until she bought him one - "a two-dollar shirt with a six-dollar lizard on it," she said. — Peter Benchley

don't mind. I just thought you might not want to." The three men — Peter Benchley

He awoke at five, to the whine of the television test pattern, turned off the set, and listened for the wind. It had moderated and seemed to be coming from a different quarter, but it still carried rain. He debated calling Quint, but thought, no, no use: we'll be going even if this blows up into a gale. He went upstairs and quietly dressed. Before he left the bedroom, he looked at Ellen, who had a frown on her sleeping face. "I do love you, you know," he whispered, and he kissed her brow. He started down the stairs and then, impulsively, went and looked in the boys' bedrooms. They were all asleep. — Peter Benchley

Come up fish. Come to Quint. — Peter Benchley

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

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

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

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

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

I don't believe in blaming inanimate objects for anything. — Peter Benchley

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

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

Ellen Brody:
Wanna get drunk and fool around?

Brody:
Oh Yeah. — Peter Benchley

Maybe. Maybe not. Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They're six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I'm getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What's to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? — Peter Benchley

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

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

Suppose you fell over with this fish. Is there anything you could do? Sure. Pray. It'd be like falling out of an airplane without a parachute and hoping you'll land in a haystack. The only thing that'd save you would be God, and since He pushed you overboard in the first place, I wouldn't give a nickel for your chances. — Peter Benchley

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

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

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

You're gonna need a bigger boat. — Peter Benchley

mean anything." She seemed subdued, sad. — Peter Benchley

I know now that the mythic monster I created was largely a fiction. — Peter Benchley

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

God isn't going to scribble across the sky. The shark is gone. — Peter Benchley

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

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

I dive as much as I can. — 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. — Peter Benchley

To fantasies', he said. 'Tell me about yours.' His eyes were a bright, liquid blue, and his lips were parted in a half smile. — Peter Benchley

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

Fascinations breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival. — Peter Benchley