Simon Leys > Quotes

“Whenever people wonder “What is the truth?” usually it is because the truth is just under their noses—but it would be very inconvenient to acknowledge it.”
― Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays

“Mao has never accepted the failure of the "Great Leap". As one of the texts reproduced below demonstrates, he would have preferred to see China perish from famine rather than readjust his own vision or recognize his mistakes.”
― Simon Leys, The Chairman's New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution

“... it is only a very rare artist that is as good as his art.”
― Simon Leys

“The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendour that is towering above us, is probably the saddest urge of human nature.”
― Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays

“Had Don Quixote been simply and plainly mad, or had he indulged in a protracted game of self-deception and play-acting, we should not be talking of him now, Van Doren observes—“We are talking of him because we suspect that, in the end, he did become a knight.”
― Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays

“...the indignation of the patron in a restaurant who, having been served caviar on toast, complained that the jam had a funny taste of fish.”
― Simon Leys

“(On Waugh) ...and his capability to cut himself off from reality in order to become a detached spectator of his own predicament. The same mechanism of imagination which produce feelings of panic, can also - if guaided by forceful will - generate couradge.”
― Simon Leys

“(On Waugh) As a protective device against the bruising contact of life, he was determined to see events and people as a fction from which he was separate.”
― Simon Leys

“...timeless (and therefore untimely) truth.”
― Simon Leys

“They have learned the hard way what the church has known for a long time: before canonizing someone, wait until he is dead - and sometimes, to be quite sure, chose someone who never existed.”
― Simon Leys, Chinese Shadows

“Let us admit it, to irritate idiots actually is enjoyable.”
― Simon Leys

“La mode maoïste qui prévaut aujourd'hui dans certains milieux intellectuels d'Occident est étonnamment semblable dans tous ses mécanismes à la chinoiserie du XVIIIème, - celle des pagodes de jardins et des magots de cheminées. C'est un nouvel exotisme: comme l'ancien, il se fonde sur l'ignorance et sur l'imagination - et, avec les meilleures intentions du monde, il témoigne inconsciemment d'un mépris sans bornes pour les Chinois, leur humanité, les réalités de leur vie, de leur langue, de leur culture, de leur passé, de leur présent.”
― Simon Leys, Chinese Shadows

“Unamuno remarked that John the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Ignatius of Loyola did not reject rationality, nor did they distrust scientific knowledge; what led them to their mysticism was simply the perception of "an intolerable disparity between the hugness of their desire and the smallness of reality”
― Simon Leys

“One of the favorite pastimes of Peking people—they do not have many—is to crowd around the entrance of the Peking Hotel or near the Great Hall of the People on gala nights to see the long processions of official cars go past with drawn curtains. Those people, one feels, have no envy or bitterness—they have the experience of three thousand years of despotism—but only the normal curiosity of gapers who try to glimpse, however fleetingly, the faraway magical world where their mysterious rulers live.”
― Simon Leys, Chinese Shadows

“One may say without exaggeration that Les Misérables triggered War and Peace.[23] Giants breed giants.”
― Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays