Louis L'Amour

The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.

I think it's time that we have a women's show about the West. The concentration has been on the men and the Indians.

I'm actually writing history. It isn't what you'd call big history. I don't write about presidents and generals... I write about the man who was ranching, the man who was mining, the man who was opening up the country.

All loose things seem to drift down to the sea, and so did I.

Nobody got anywhere in the world by simply being content.

A wise man fights to win, but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat.

Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.

No one can get an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process.

Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That's absolute nonsense. In the one year during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people. In offices, applying for jobs, waiting to see a dentist, waiting in a restaurant for friends, many such places.

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.

To disbelieve is easy; to scoff is simple; to have faith is harder.

He might never really do what he said, but at least he had it in mind. He had somewhere to go.

I don't travel and tell stories, because that's not the way these days. But I write my books to be read aloud, and I think of myself in that oral tradition.

I had begun reading earlier than most because my sister Emmy Lou, no doubt to keep me from bothering her, decided it was easier to teach me to read stories to myself rather than to read them to me, as she had been doing.

No memory is ever alone; it's at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.

I think of myself... as a troubadour, a village storyteller, the guy in the shadows of the campfire.

A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.

If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it's a historical novel. If it's west of the Mississippi, it's a western, a different category. There's no sense to it.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.