Peter Benchley Quotes

“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, Jaws

“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

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

“Life's full of chances to hurt yourself or someone else.”
― Peter Benchley, The Deep

“Life's full of chances to hurt yourself or someone else [...] In the next few days, you'll have more chances to hurt yourself than most men get in a lifetime. It's learning things and doing things right that make it worthwhile, make a man easy with himself. When I was young, nobody could tell me anything. I knew it all. It took a lot of mistakes to teach me that I didn't know goose shit from tapioca.”
― Peter Benchley, The Deep

“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, Beast