Quotes from Louis L'Amour

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'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.

Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.

A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner, so if one's life is cold and bare he can blame none but himself. You have a chance to select from pretty elegant furnishings.

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

What is education but a conditioning of the mind to a society and a way of life.

What do you wish to be? What would you like to become?" I did not know, and I told her so, but the question worried me. Should I know? "There is time," she said, "but the sooner you know, the sooner you can plan. To have a goal is the important thing, and to work toward it. Then, if you decide you wish to do something different, you will at least have been moving, you will have been going somewhere, you will have been learning.

We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different.

We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become.

Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.

He never knew when he was whipped ... So he never was.......

There is nothing more dangerous than a woman with a shotgun. Because you don't know when it's going to go off...and neither does she.

Indeed, I find that distance lends perspective and I often write better of a place when I am some distance from it. One can be so overwhelmed by the forest as to miss seeing the trees.

Knowledge was not meant to be locked behind doors. It breathes best in the open air where all men can inhale its essence.

Knowledge is like money: To be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.

violence is an evil thing, but when the guns are all in the hands of the men without respect for human rights, then men are really in trouble.

The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.

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

Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They are the thread upon which it all hangs, and they can save us when all else is lost.

Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before - it takes something from him.

You stick your finger in the water and you pull it out, and that is how much of a hole you leave when you're gone.

I do not think much of ages. People are people. What does it matter how old or young they are? It is a category, and I do not like categories. It is a sort of pigeonhole or a label.

To a fool time brings only age not wisdom.

I wonder why it is the man who pleads for mercy never gives it.