Top 40 Peter Benchley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...”

— Peter Benchley

2. “The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.”

— Peter Benchley

3. “Without sharks, you take away the apex predator of the ocean, and you destroy the entire food chain.”

— Peter Benchley

4. “If man doesn’t learn to treat the oceans and the rain forest with respect, man will become extinct.”

— Peter Benchley

5. “Oceanography is a terrific career because gradually we seem to be coming around to realize that we had better become as acquainted with the seventy percent of our planet that is covered by water as we are with the dark side of the moon.”

— Peter Benchley

6. “The great fish moved silently through the night water.”

— Peter Benchley

7. “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.”

— Peter Benchley

8. “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

— Peter Benchley

9. “Fascinations breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival.”

— Peter Benchley

10. “I know now that the mythic monster I created was largely a fiction.”

— Peter Benchley

11. “Forgive me, I’m a relentless bastard.”

— Peter Benchley

12. “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.”

— Peter Benchley

13. “The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future. It’s depressing if you spend too much time reliving the old joys. You think you’ll never have anything as good again.”

— Peter Benchley

14. “What had once seemed shallow and tedious now loomed in memory like paradise.”

— Peter Benchley

15. “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.”

— Peter Benchley

16. “Sharks are like ax-murderers, Martin. People react to them with their guts. There’s something crazy and evil and uncontrollable about them.”

— Peter Benchley

17. “Look, Chief, you can’t go off half-cocked looking for vengeance against a fish. That shark isn’t evil. It’s not a murderer. It’s just obeying its own instincts. Trying to get retribution against a fish is crazy.”

— Peter Benchley

18. “Sharks don’t target human beings, and they certainly don’t hold grudges.”

— Peter Benchley

19. “Intellectually, they knew a great deal. Practically, they chose to know almost nothing.”

— Peter Benchley

20. “Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth.”

— Peter Benchley

21. “I’ve never been hurt by a sea creature, except for jellyfish and sea urchins.”

— Peter Benchley

22. “Brody felt a shimmy of fear skitter up his back. He was a very poor swimmer, and the prospect of being on top of – let alone in – water above his head give him what his mother used to call the wimwams: sweaty palms, a persistent need to swallow, and a ache in his stomach – essentially the sensation some people feel about flying. In Brody’s dreams, deep water was populated by slimy, savage things that rose from below and shredded his flesh, by demons that cackled and moaned.”

— Peter Benchley

23. “God isn’t going to scribble across the sky. “The shark is gone.”

— Peter Benchley

24. “Life’s full of chances to hurt yourself or someone else.”

— Peter Benchley

25. “I guess I’m a hopeful optimist, because to be a pessimist is to be suicidal.”

— Peter Benchley

26. “Suppose you fell over with this fish. Is there anything you could do? Sure. Pray. It’d be like falling out of an airplane without a parachute and hoping you’ll land in a haystack. The only thing that’d save you would be God, and since He pushed you overboard in the first place, I wouldn’t give a nickel for your chances.”

— Peter Benchley

27. “The fish was an enemy. It had come upon the community and killed two men, a woman, and a child. The people of Amity would demand the death of the fish. They would need to see it dead before they could feel secure enough to resume their normal lives.”

— Peter Benchley

28. “I don’t believe in blaming inanimate objects for anything.”

— Peter Benchley

29. “I’m a babe in the woods when it comes to the Internet.”

— Peter Benchley

30. “Don’t go into the water if you’re bleeding – at all, from anything, anywhere on your body.”

— Peter Benchley

31. “The young man was tall and slim. He wore sandals and a bathing suit and a short-sleeved shirt with an alligator emblem stitched to the left breast, which caused Brody to take an instant, instinctive dislike to the man. In his adolescence Brody had thought of those shirts as badges of wealth and position. All the summer people wore them. Brody badgered his mother until she bought him one – “a two-dollar shirt with a six-dollar lizard on it,” she said.”

— Peter Benchley

32. “A terrible, painful sadness clutched at Ellen. More than ever before, she felt that her life – the best part of it, at least, the part that was fresh and fun – was behind her. Recognizing the sensation made her feel guilty, for she read it as proof that she was an unsatisfactory mother, an unsatisfied wife. She hated her life, and hated herself for hating it. She thought of a line from a song Billy played on the stereo: “I’d trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday.”

— Peter Benchley

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

— Peter Benchley

34. “Hooper ladled chum, which sounded to Brody, every time it hit the water, like diarrhea.”

— Peter Benchley

35. “To fantasies’, he said. ‘Tell me about yours.’ His eyes were a bright, liquid blue, and his lips were parted in a half smile.”

— Peter Benchley

36. “Any weapon’s only as good as the man using it, and a good man can make a good weapon out of most anything.”

— Peter Benchley

37. “Reputations rise and fall almost as regularly as the tides.”

— Peter Benchley

38. “I dive as much as I can.”

— Peter Benchley

39. “It was a funny thing, he thought, that when you live all your life in a place, you almost never do the things that tourists go there to do – like walk on the beach or go swimming in the ocean. He couldn’t remember the last time he went swimming. He wasn’t even sure he still owned a bathing suit. It was like something he had heard about New York – that half the people who live in the city never go to the top of the Empire State Building or visit the Statue of Liberty.”

— Peter Benchley

40. “That’s the only hitch in learning: it’s humbling. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. Anyway, all that’s a long way around saying that it’s crazy to do things just to prove you can do ’em. The more you learn, the more you’ll find yourself doing things you never thought you could do in a million years.”

— Peter Benchley

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

— Peter Benchley

42. “You could start now, and spend another forty years learning about the sea without running out of new things to know.”

— Peter Benchley

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

— Peter Benchley

44. “If people would make an effort to learn about the wonders that did exist, he thought, their appetite for dragons would be well satisfied.”

— Peter Benchley

45. “She’s nice enough, but she’s got the IQ of an artichoke.”

— Peter Benchley