97 Quotes by Peter Benchley

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

You're much more likely to be attacked by lightning or by your own toilet than you are by a shark,

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