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

“You're gonna need a bigger boat.”

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

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

“Come up fish. Come to Quint.”

“Brody felt a shimmy of fear skitter up his back. He was a very poor swimmer, and the prospect of being on top of—let alone in—water above his head give him what his mother used to call the wimwams: sweaty palms, a persistent need to swallow, and a ache in his stomach—essentially the sensation some people feel about flying. In Brody's dreams, deep water was populated by slimy, savage things that rose from below and shredded his flesh, by demons that cackled and moaned.”

“He felt at once betrayed and betrayer, deceived and deceiver. He was a criminal forced into crime, an unwilling whore.”