Peter Benchley
Peter Benchley
Peter Bradford Benchleywas an American author. He wrote the novel Jaws and co-wrote its subsequent film adaptation with Carl Gottlieb. Several more of his works were also adapted for cinema, including The Deep, The Island, Beast, and White Shark...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth8 May 1940
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
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Sharks don't target human beings, and they certainly don't hold grudges.
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There was a minor burst of macho nuttiness after 'Jaws' came out, in which people would go off in shark tournaments and come back holding the bloody heads of these animals and say, 'Look what I did.' But they've been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years anyway.
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It's hard to care deeply for something that might turn on you and eat you.
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Everything I've written is based on something that has happened to me or something that I know a great deal about.
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You're much more likely to be attacked by lightning or by your own toilet than you are by a shark,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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If you're young and wild, you tend to believe your clippings. One day you're Hemingway. The next day you're nothing.
We should be afraid of sharks half as much as sharks should be afraid of us.
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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.
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I don't think there's such a thing as an unprovoked shark attack.
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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.