Eugenie Clark Quotes

I am an underwater explorer, not a treasure hunter.

As a young boy, I was very interested - as I still am - in all sorts of adventure and exploration. I thought about being an astronaut, a dinosaur scientist, or marine biologist, but I clearly was drawn to the ocean and to the water.

I'm friends with James Cameron. We've spent time together over the years because he is a diver and explorer and in his heart of hearts a biologist. We run into each other at scientific conferences.

Since my first dive in a deep-diving submersible, when I went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays, I've been a bioluminescence junky. But I would come back from those dives and try to share the experience with words, and they were totally inadequate to the task. I needed some way to share the experience directly.

Jacques Cousteau was my hero.

I was into Jacques Cousteau as a kid and started scuba-diving around 14, which blew my mind. It was all colour, another world.

I want to be a scientist who studies the ocean when I grow up. I would go out to sea, and scuba dive, and find new things, and National Geographic will hire me.” Sure, Nudge. Probably around the time I become president.

I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.

I have in hands, now, specimens of bottom from t he Gulf Stream, obtained by Lieutenant Craven, and I can say that they are among the most interesting that I have ever seen.

When I was a kid, Jacques Cousteau was my hero and the person who inspired me to become an underwater explorer. I have many other people who inspired me after him, but he is still my all-time hero.

When I was a child, I saw my father diving to the deepest point in the ocean with the U.S. Navy.

I think there's so much we don't know and the unknown in the ocean; every 10 years or so, we find some fossil that's been there before mankind.

Of course there is still unexplored terrestrial territory, but most of it is waterlogged. Submersed secret places, such as the Challenger Deep, which today lure hi-tech adventurers like Richard Branson and James Cameron, will undoubtedly provide welcome fodder for 'National Geographic.'

If you're going to make a lot of films about a particular group of animals, you might as well pick one that's fairly common. And octopus are: they live in all the oceans. They also live deep. And I can't say octopus are responsible for my really strong interest in getting in subs and going deep, but whatever the case, I like that.

There's a long list of technologies that have now made it possible to carry out very precise search efforts in the deep sea.

I love storytelling, I love being a visual person, and it just made perfect sense to be an underwater photographer and explore the ocean and work with scientists.

I can't think of anything I regret. Everything I've done, I've enjoyed doing. I've had five husbands, four children. I've done it all, but mainly I've enjoyed studying fish and being underwater with them, being in their natural habitat, looking at the fish and the fish looking at me.

My grandfather was Jacques Cousteau, a pioneer of ocean exploration and the co-inventor of scuba diving. Back in the 1940s when he tested out his invention which allowed humans to swim freely in the ocean with a portable air source for the first time in history, very little of the ocean had been explored let alone captured on film.

If I could have been a marine biologist I would have, but I didn't have that kind of intelligence. Numbers were never my strong point.

If you ever really want to get away from it all and see something that you have never seen, and have an excellent chance of seeing something no one has ever seen, get in a sub. You climb in, seal the hatch, turn on a little oxygen, turn on the scrubber, which removes the CO2 in the air you breathe, and they chuck you overboard. Down you go.

I've had the joy of spending thousands of hours under the sea. I wish I could take people along to see what I see, and to know what I know.

The Deep Flight Challenger technology is a game-changer for ocean exploration.

I'm a big diver. I like to dive when I travel, and my last dive was in the Galapagos. I used to live in San Francisco and I would dive all the time in Monterey.

My favourite thing to do on this planet is to scuba dive.

When I was younger, I wanted to be a marine biologist, among other things.