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..

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

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

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 c….

Sharks have everything a scientist dreams of. They're beautiful―God, how beautiful they are! They're like an impossibly perfect piece of machinery. T….

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

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

I dive as much as I can..

The ocean is the only alien and potentially hostile environment on the planet into which we tend to venture without thinking about the animals that l….

He would have lied to himself as facilely as an alcoholic lies to himself to justify the 10 a.m. tumbler of vodka : it may be early here, but in Bagh….

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 oppres….

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

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

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 p….

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….

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

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. H….

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

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

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

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