You could start now, and spend another forty years learning about the sea without running out of new things to know.
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.
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.
Without sharks, you take away the apex predator of the ocean, and you destroy the entire food chain.
Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline.
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.
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.
We are already perilously close to killing off the top of the oceanic food chain - with catastrophic consequences that we can't begin to imagine. Let us not, in the heat of anger, reduce the already devastated population of great white sharks by one more member.
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.
I believe implicitly that every young man in the world is fascinated with either sharks or dinosaurs.
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 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.
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.'
Fascinations breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival.
Reputations rise and fall almost as regularly as the tides.
I don't think there's such a thing as an unprovoked shark attack.
