Louis L'Amour Writing Quotations

You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.

One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter - who was a child at the time - asked me, "Daddy, why are you writing so fast?" And I replied, "Because I want to see how the story turns out!

If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.

I do not believe writers should read reviews of their own books, and I do not. If one is not careful one is soon writing to please reviewers and not their audience or themselves.

The dancer becomes the dance. And I am the writing.

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

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

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on

If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.

Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble. It sounds swell when you write about it, but it's hell when you meet it face to face in a dark and lonely place.