All Quotes

"Don't go in the water."

"She was the first."

"Do you like fish? Well, he likes you too..."

"See it before you go swimming."

"[from TV spot] There is a creature alive today who has survived millions of years of evolution, without change, without passion and without logic. It lives to kill - a mindless eating machine. It will attack and devour anything. It is as if God created the Devil, and gave him Jaws."

"[from re-release trailer] It was seen by 67 million people. It took two years to make. It was shown in 40 countries, in 17 different languages. Nominated for 18 awards... If you forgot what terror is like, the original Jaws is back."

"Roy Scheider - Police Chief Martin Brody"

"Robert Shaw - Quint"

"Richard Dreyfuss - Matt Hooper"

"Lorraine Gary - Ellen Brody"

"Murray Hamilton - Mayor Larry Vaughn"

"Carl Gottlieb - Ben Meadows"

"Jeffrey Kramer - Deputy Leonard 'Lenny' Hendricks"

"[first lines] Saturday, March 24, 1984. Shermer High School, Shermer, Illinois, 60062. Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. What we did was wrong. But we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? And you see us as you want to see us - in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Correct? That's the way we saw each other at 7:00 this morning. We were brainwashed."

"Chicks cannot hold their smoke, dat's what it is."

"Screws fall out all the time; the world is an imperfect place."

"Hey, how come Andrew gets to get up? If he gets up, we'll all get up…it'll be anarchy!'"

"[to Claire] You know how you said before that your parents use you to get back at each other? Wouldn't I be outstanding in that capacity?"

"Yeah, I got a question. Does Barry Manilow know that you raid his wardrobe?"

"They only met once, but it changed their lives forever."

"They were five total strangers, with nothing in common, meeting for the first time. A brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel and a recluse. Before the day was over, they broke the rules. Bared their souls and touched each other in a way they never dreamed possible."

"Five strangers with nothing in common, except each other."

"Emilio Estevez — Andrew "Andy" Clark"

"Anthony Michael Hall — Brian Ralph Johnson"

"Judd Nelson — John Bender"

"Molly Ringwald — Claire Standish"

"Ally Sheedy — Allison Reynolds"

"Paul Gleason — Vice Principal Richard Vernon"

"John Kapelos — Carl, the Janitor"

"Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love."

"There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book."

"Conquered people tend to be witty."

"All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!"

"We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it — the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it."

"We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals."

"I think that New York is not the cultural center of America, but the business and administrative center of American culture."

"Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door."

"Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology."

"I never yet touched a fig leaf that didn't turn into a price tag."

"Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything."

"No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection."

"Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for."

"A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice."

"Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing — a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the U.N., the financial collapse of New York. We can't avoid being politicized (a word as murky as the condition which it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so large and so terrible), can be screened out. The study of literature itself is heavily "politicized.""

"For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it."

"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep."

"All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac."

"There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever — money, for instance, or war."

"Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what’s in it. They should, because they put it all in beforehand. It's like an Easter Egg hunt."

"Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."