Peter Benchley Quotes

Many people continue to think of sharks as man-eating beasts. Sharks are enormously powerful and wild creatures, but you're more likely to be killed by your kitchen toaster than a shark!

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

Sharks freak me out.

I don't know a single surfer who would say, 'Gee, I wish there were no sharks in the ocean.'

Sharks are just evil bastards. I'm quite happy if all the sharks just went, because they eat fish and us. And we need the fish.

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

People don't need to be scared. I tickle sharks. I do, when they swim by.

I still think there's a big part of the population that has a lot of misinformation about sharks. But I think it's beginning to change a little bit. As good information about sharks permeates popular culture, things may start to change.

I don't use cages - I've been surrounded by 150 to 200 sharks, not once ever been close to being bitten.

I have photographed sharks in waters around the globe, and I always want more and yearn to peer deeper into their world. To feed my passion and to raise awareness, I developed a story about sharks for 'National Geographic' magazine.

I've never been bitten by a shark, though God knows I had to poke a lot of them in the nose.

There's still a lot of people out there who think the only good shark is a dead shark.

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.

I think sharks are beautiful creatures, and I don't think we should stop going in the ocean because of them. You drive down the road and you get in an accident, but most people end up driving down the road again. Surfing is you're going into their home and it's just a natural part of life.

If I swim in the ocean, I have a shark thought. Not a bad one, but just a little one.

I've seen sharks in the ocean, it hasn't made me get out of the ocean; that's for sure.

On Cape Cod, great white shark stocks have been growing, or at least becoming more concentrated, because of the multiplying numbers of seals around Monomoy Island. We are fortunate to have such abundance of these sharks in our own waters. Around the globe, we are killing in excess of 100 million sharks each year.

For a photographer, sharks are a stirring subject, possessing a perfect blend of grace and power. They have been sculpted by evolution and are ideally suited for whichever ecosystem they inhabit, from coral reefs to the open ocean.

The Oceanic White Tip is considered one of the most dangerous sharks in the sea along with the Great White and Tiger. It is responsible for some of the most famous episodes of man-eating in history, such as when the U.S.S. Indianapolis sank in 1945.

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.

I love the sea's sounds and the way it reflects the sky. The colours that shimmer across its surface are unbelievable. This, combined with the colour of the water over white sand, surprises me every time.

I get a bit depressed if I walk into a restaurant and see shark-fin soup on the menu.

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.

Turns out, I couldn't catch them - or even get close to them. I realized that sharks are amazing, beautiful animals who have absolutely no interest in checking me out.

I swam with my first shark in the 1980s. I was 20 miles off the coast of Rhode Island, working with a group of marine scientists. Late in the day, a 5-foot long blue shark swam into our chum slick. For the next hour, I marveled at the animal's stunning indigo color and the elegant way she moved effortlessly through the sea.