Popularity: 5
Vote:   | After college, I traveled around the world for a year and wrote a book called Time and a Ticket. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | But if we misuse the technology and destroy the very resources we intend to harvest, I think we deserve the blame. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Everything I've written is based on something that has happened to me or something that I know a great deal about. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I also do a radio show every day on about 200 radio stations across the country and around the world, called The Ocean Report. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I am a bulldog about authenticity, both historical and natural, and one of the terrific things we discovered in our research was that back in the 1600's people were about to use repeating crossbows when firearms came in and made them obsolete. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I believe implicitly that every young man in the world is fascinated with either sharks or dinosaurs. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I discovered in the process that books and movies are completely different media. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | I dive as much as I can. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I don't believe in blaming inanimate objects for anything. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I grew up during the summers in Nantucket, and spent all my time in or on the water. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I grew up spending my summers on Nantucket, fishing and swimming, so whereas some kids were into dinosaurs, I was naturally into sharks. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | I guess I'm a hopeful optimist, because to be a pessimist is to be suicidal. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I have been frightened by sharks and moray eels and killer whales and sperm whales, but never hurt. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I know now that the mythic monster I created was largely a fiction. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I never met Cousteau. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don't think there's a single writer who influences me. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I sat in the back room of the Pennington Furnace Supply Co. in Pennington, New Jersey, in the winters, and in a small, old turkey coop in Stonington, Connecticut, in the summers, and wrote what turned out to be JAWS. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | I'm a babe in the woods when it comes to the Internet. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I'm specifically interested in underwater archeology. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I've never been hurt by a sea creature, except for jellyfish and sea urchins. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | If man doesn't learn to treat the oceans and the rain forest with respect, man will become extinct. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | If you're careful, you don't have to worry about being attacked by sea creatures. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | In 1967 I went to work as a speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson in the White House, where I stayed until January of 1969. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | It was a first novel about a fish, so who cares? |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | It was a first novel, and nobody reads first novels. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | No, I graduated from Harvard with a major in English in 1961. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Once in a while, sharks make a dedicated assault on a human being. Still, when a two-ton animal takes a taste of you, it doesn't do much good to apologize. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Reputations rise and fall almost as regularly as the tides. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | So poachers have a huge advantage. That's pretty much true everywhere in the world. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The great white shark is, more importantly, endangered as the apex predator among fish. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The only way to prevent it is to establish enforceable international agreements on limiting catches and establishing marine preserves where fish have a chance to grow up without being killed. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | Twenty-five years ago nobody knew much about white sharks. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | We have a terrible feeling of superiority and don't really respect the fact that the world's greatest wilderness is at our back door. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | When I was growing up, I was very fond of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck; all the usual suspects. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | With BEAST, I had been fishing for giant squid for years with no luck. Again, it was a speculation, of a what if story. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | Without the oceans there would be no life on Earth. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | Yes, I've had countless encounters with sharks. |