Louis L'Amour

I have never scoffed at sentiment.Cynicism is ever the outward face of emptiness.

In the beginning there was a dream, a young boy's dream, a dream of far lands to see, of oceans to cross, and somewhere at the trail's end, a girl. The girl.

More than all else I wanted to tell stories, stories that people could read or hear, stories to love and remember. I had no desire to write to please those who made it their business to comment but for the people who do the work of the world, who live on the land or love the land, people who make and bake and struggle to make ends meet, for the people who invent, who design, for the people who do. And if somewhere down the line a man or woman can put a finger on a line and say, "Yes, that is that way it was I was there," then I would be amply repaid.

I have never scoffed at sentiment. Cynicism is ever the outward face of emptiness.

What, after all, is romance? It is the music of those who make the world turn, the people who make things happen. Romance is the story of dreams that could happen and so often do.

Why do men ride the range? Go to sea? Explore the polar icecaps? Why do they ride rockets to unknown worlds? It is because of romance, because of the stories they have read and the stories they have dreamed.

Some have said this is the age of the nonhero, that the day of the hero is gone. That's nonsense. When the hero is gone, man himself will be gone, fo rthe hero is our future, our destiny.

These are some of the stories of a writer trying to find his way, trying to find the truth of what he has seen, to understand the people, to learn a little more about telling a story.

The people whom I have met and with whom I worked in those early years were not always nice people, but each in his own way was strong, or he could not survive. Of course, there were some who did not, could not survive. For one reason or another, nature weeded then out and cast them aside, just as happened on our frontier during the westward movement.

Some of these stories are from my own life; some are from the lives of people I met along the way.