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

“The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.”

“The fish might well have disappeared already, but Brody wasn't willing to gamble lives on the possibility: the odds might be good, but the stakes were prohibitively high.”

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

“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.”

“Look, Chief, you can't go off half-cocked looking for vengeance against a fish. That shark isn't evil. It's not a murderer. It's just obeying its own instincts. Trying to get retribution against a fish is crazy.”

“You're gonna need a bigger boat.”