Peter Benchley
Author
1940-05-08
Quotes by Peter Benchley
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God isn't going to scribble across the sky. The shark is gone.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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God isn't going to scribble across the sky. The shark is gone.
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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.
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I guess I'm a hopeful optimist, because to be a pessimist is to be suicidal.
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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.
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Reputations rise and fall almost as regularly as the tides.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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Twenty-five years ago nobody knew much about white sharks.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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