Peter Benchley

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.'

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I dive as much as I can.

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

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

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

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

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

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