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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth.

I dive as much as I can.

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

Reputations rise and fall almost as regularly as the tides.

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

A human being is still more likely to die of a bee sting, snake bite or, Lord knows, automobile accident than by shark attack. We do not execute the perpretrators of death by car. We should not butcher an animal for an inadvertent homicide.

Almost any shark, three or four feet long, could kill a human being if it chose to do it. It could make you bleed to death. But they don't.

Fascinations breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival.

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.

I don't think there's such a thing as an unprovoked shark attack.

I hope that 'Jaws' will have brought sharks into the public interest at a time when we desperately need to reevaluate our care for the environment.

If we choose to walk into a forest where a tiger lives, we are taking a chance. If we swim in a river where crocodiles live, we are taking a chance. If we visit the desert or climb a mountain or enter a swamp where snakes have managed to survive, we are taking a chance.

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.

If you're young and wild, you tend to believe your clippings. One day you're Hemingway. The next day you're nothing.

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.'

It is not that I don't have a fear of sharks, it is that I have a respect for them, so that I know any more than if I were to go into the jungle, I would have a fear of tigers, that I would try to lower the odds.

We do not just fear our predators, we are transfixed by them. We are prone to weave stories and fables and chat endlessly about them.

We provoke a shark every time we enter the water where sharks happen to be, for we forget: The ocean is not our territory - it's theirs.

We should be afraid of sharks half as much as sharks should be afraid of us.

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

Fascinations breeds preparedness and preparedness survival.

We provoke a shark every time we enter the water where sharks happen to be, for we forget: The ocean is not our territory it's theirs.

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.

It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world - it's the American way of looking at things.

Neither our oceans nor our radar nor our fighters can keep us intact through another major war.

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.

Global warming has melted the polar ice caps, raised the levels of the oceans and flooded the earth's great cities. Despite its evident prosperity, New Jersey is scarcely Utopia.

Three things have been difficult to tame: the oceans, fools and women. We may soon be able to tame the oceans; fools and women will take a little longer.

Some things are only capable of being done in space. Examples of that are looking at our Earth from that far away, and understanding the entire processes of storms and weather patterns, and oceans, and coastlines.

We do not have the luxury of two big oceans protecting us as we have had in the past, for we now have a new kind of enemy who deals with stealthiness. Our ability to protect ourselves is having the information ahead of time so we can thwart the attack.

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

To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.

If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that one year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years.

Our surest protection against assault from abroad has been not all our guards, gates and guns, or even our two oceans, but our essential goodness as a people. Our richest asset has been not our material wealth but our values.

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

We've been a country that's been fortunate to be protected by two oceans, to not have serious attacks on our territory for most of our history. And we were unfortunately reminded in a very devastating way of our vulnerability.

Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth.

We are opening up an enormous new era in archaeology. Time capsules in the deep oceans.

I think the Caribbean countries face rising oceans and they face increase in the severity of hurricanes. This is something that is very, very scary to all of us. The island states in the world represent - I remember this number - one-half of 1 percent of the carbon emissions in the world. And they will - some of them will disappear.

The 2008 election settled nothing, not even for a while. Our national politics are reflecting what appears to be going on geologically, on the bottom of the oceans and beneath the crust of the Earth: the tectonic plates are moving.