Comme beaucoup d'intellectuels, il était incapable de dire quelque chose de simple, de façon simple

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

Marcel Proust

But I will say it, now that he is gone and can't scoff: Elmore Leonard was as sophisticated, as deep, and yes, as literary as they come. He was one of the great American writers of our time and I want to spend these last few hundred words saying why. First, take those free-flowing plots, swift, simple and true: This is unbelievably difficult to pull off. Not only do his characters bounce off each other like billiard balls in increasingly complex patterns, every move they make is natural, in character, a person simply doing what he or she would really do, thereby generating what the rest of us call a story.

David Gordon

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/8/21/elmore-leonard-thegoldstandardforhonestunfancywriting.html