Quote collection
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"Politically, [Albert Camus] was in favour of a federation, and effectively he considered that like South Africa today (or as they are trying to do), there should be a mixed population with equal rights, the same rights for the Arab and the French populations, as well as all the other races living there."
"[Albert Camus] positions are sensed. So, naturally, those intellectuals who don't have that experience have difficulty in comprehending it. But I think it made Camus more tolerant because he had already seen both sides of things when the others had only ever seen one. They imagine poverty, but they don't know what it is. In fact they've got a sort of bad conscience about the working classes."
"[Albert Camus]didn't have much hope that things would work out, but he wanted them to. Algeria had reached such a degree of violence that once such violence is created there's no more room for reflection. And there's no mediating position. If you look at Bosnia today, the Croats, Bosnians and Serbs, they've all created so much horror that one starts to wonder how these peoples can live together, after having done what they have. Already the violence has reached such a degree that everybody is living in hate, there's no possibility of reflection, no mediating position."
"[Albert Camus] always held a profound commitment [engagement], a real resistance to all totalitarianism."
"The Outsider isn't [Albert] Camus, but in The Outsider there are parts of Camus. There's this impression of exile."
"[Albert Camus] is The First Man because he is poor, which has never been much to human beings."
"[Albert Camus] really did know Algeria. He was an exile from his country, but still living in its language. Solitaire et solidaire. It's not like those who are exiled to a country where the language is not theirs."
"There's no one who can say 'this person is wrong there and right here', and that 'one is right about that and wrong about this'. This is what could allow populations, or even two human beings, to live together. We will only solve problems by the acceptance of, and enrichment by, our differences."
"[Albert Camus] was viewed by many as an austere moralist, but it was on the football pitch and in the theatre that he learnt his 'morality'. It's something sensed, it won't pass uniquely through thought. It couldn't possibly."
"I think [Albert Camus] wanted to write something to explain who he was, and how he was different from the age that had been conferred upon him."
"We can't talk about the book [Albert Camus] wanted to write because we have barely its beginnings. He had written hardly any of it, but he needed to write it. It seems to me that if you look at the style of The First Man it conforms much more to who he was as a man, it resembles him very closely."
"There are indications that today the intellectuals are coming back to [Albert] Camus. History has given them reason to, with the fall of communism."
"In fact it was always the Communist problem which was responsible for the opposition to [Albert] Camus. It was always and overall a political thing, a kind of misunderstanding."
"[Albert]Camus had denounced the gulag and Stalin's trials. Today we can see that he was right. To say that there were concentration camps in the USSR at the time was blasphemous, something very serious indeed. Today we think about the USSR with the camps also in mind, but before it just wasn't allowed. Nobody was allowed to think that or say that if you were left-wing."
"Albert Camus was never abandoned by his readers. Camus is enormously read. He's the highest selling author in the entire Gallimard collection, and has been for some years now. Sales haven't ever stopped, so to talk about rediscovering him would suggest that he isn't read anymore and that's not true."
"We must remember that [Albert] Camus wrote not even a third of what he had wished to."
"The First Man is [Albert Camus] posthumous last work. But in fact, in a certain way, it is his first, because in it you find the signs of his commitments, and of the whole way of writing as well. This mixture of austerity and sensuality, the will to speak for those not able to speak for themselves."
"[Albert Camus] wasn't writing under the influence of the Nobel Prize. That was an external thing for the artist in him."
"The Nobel Prize comes from outside, it's a social recognition [reconnaissance] in a way. And I think a true artist is driven by interior necessities."
"Where [Albert Camus] is in exile isn't especially in Paris or elsewhere, but from the intellectual world, because of his origins."