Great Throughts Treasury

"Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing."

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

"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."

"Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water..."

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

"But if we misuse the technology and destroy the very resources we intend to harvest, I think we deserve the blame."

"If man doesn't learn to treat the oceans and the rain forest with respect, man will become extinct."

"Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth."

"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."

"Come up fish. Come to Quint."

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

"He felt at once betrayed and betrayer, deceived and deceiver. He was a criminal forced into crime, an unwilling whore."

"I also do a radio show every day on about 200 radio stations across the country and around the world, called The Ocean Report."

"I discovered in the process that books and movies are completely different media."

"I dive as much as I can."

"I don't believe in blaming inanimate objects for anything."

"I don't keep a writer's notebook. I seem to store things in my head and when the time comes, I am fortunate enough to have them come forward."

"After college, I traveled around the world for a year and wrote a book called Time and a Ticket."

"I had been thinking for almost ten years about telling the story because of a news clip I read about a man who caught a two ton white shark off Long Island."

"I grew up during the summers in Nantucket, and spent all my time in or on the water."

"I have been frightened by sharks and moray eels and killer whales and sperm whales, but never hurt."

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

"I grew up spending my summers on Nantucket, fishing and swimming, so whereas some kids were into dinosaurs, I was naturally into sharks."

"I grew up in New York City, attended school there through the eighth grade and then went on for secondary school to the Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire."

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

"I know now that the mythic monster I created was largely a fiction."

"I went to work for the Washington Post for about a half a year, then worked for Newsweek Magazine as the television editor for three years."

"I then became a freelance writer and worked for whoever would pay the bills. I wrote movie reviews, travel pieces, freelance television work, compiled synopses of the news for newspapers... whatever I could do to earn a dollar."

"If there's an underlying them in the books I've written about marine creatures, it's that man has a responsibility to co-exist with his environment, not to try to dominate it."

"If we can redirect our resources towards the oceans and away from the stars for a couple of years, I think the future holds enormous promise."

"If we kill everything in the ocean, and if we pollute the ocean to a point where it can't sustain life, we're committing suicide."

"I'm going down to South Africa in about two weeks to dive with great whites again, and every time you get into the water with a great white you feel completely insignificant."

"I'm specifically interested in underwater archeology."

"It was a first novel, and nobody reads first novels."

"If you're careful, you don't have to worry about being attacked by sea creatures."

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

"It was a first novel about a fish, so who cares?"

"In 1967 I went to work as a speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson in the White House, where I stayed until January of 1969."

"I've never been hurt by a sea creature, except for jellyfish and sea urchins."

"It's my hope that somehow we'll find a way to make people connect with the need to preserve the oceans and the creatures in them."

"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."

"No, I graduated from Harvard with a major in English in 1961."

"Maybe. Maybe not. Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They?re six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I?m getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What?s to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be?"

"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."

"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."

"Sharks have everything a scientist dreams of. They're beautiful? God, how beautiful they are! They're like an impossibly perfect piece of machinery. They're as graceful as any bird. They're as mysterious as any animal on earth. No one knows for sure how long they live or what impulses except for hunger they respond to. There are more than two hundred and fifty species of shark, and everyone is different from every other one."

"Reputations rise and fall almost as regularly as the tides."

"The fact that marine mammals seem to be able to make contact with autistic children, for example, is just one of the miracles waiting to be explored."

"Of course, if I am doing a story for The National Geographic or some other magazine, or if I am actually doing basic research on a book, I certainly keep a notebook all the time."

"So poachers have a huge advantage. That's pretty much true everywhere in the world."