Quote collection
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"Just because of [Albert Camus] way of sensing before thinking. He's in a field that he often feels like escaping from. In any case, you have to learn what blood is. It all has to be rationalised. In that he feels exiled, solitary."
"It's true that women appear very little in [Albert Camus] works. They have a very marginal place."
"Femininity, yes, effectively there is more in The First Man, not only in terms of women but stylistically, in its elements, the notes he wrote. You can see a real love story in it, a childhood love story, [Albert] Camus' first. Meursault [protagonist of The Outsider] and Marie were never up to much really. There is Dora in The Just and others in his plays, but they aren't so well known."
"Love is very important in The First Man, in that [Albert] Camus loves these things he never chose, he loves his childhood experience in a very real way. Their poverty meant that there was nothing else they could think about but what they would eat, how they would clothe themselves. There's just no room for other things in his family. It's difficult for others to imagine the position in which he found himself. There is no imaginary existence in their lives."
"French intellectuals are mostly petit bourgeois, and it's hard to say whether that makes [Albert] Camus' work more valuable."
"[French intellectuals] could never address themselves to the working classes. They don't know what it means, and that gives them a bad conscience about it. [Albert] Camus has a greater proximity to those in poverty."
"The First Man is completely autobiographical. The mother [Albert Camus] describes is the woman I knew, and she was exactly as he describes her. And this teacher really existed."
"[Albert] Camus writes his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in thanks to his teacher."
"Recognition, gratefulness exist.[ Speech for the Nobel Prize] is to show that this is what has come from what [Albert Camus] teacher did for him. And also throughout the world there are Monsieur Germains [his old schoolteacher] everywhere. That's why I published the letters, so that he could have a place in the work."
"In publishing The First Man I said to myself, 'this is going to be awful,' but awful from the point of view of the criticism. I'm not afraid of [Albert] Camus' public. I'm afraid of what will be written in the papers."
"[Albert Camus] started thinking through sensation. He could never think with artefacts or with cultural models because there were none. So it's true to say that his morality was extremely 'lived', made from very concrete things. It never passed by means of abstractions . It's his own experience, his way of thinking."
"There are those who will find [Albert Camus] notions about absurdity appealing, and others who will be drawn by the solar side of his work, about Algeria, the heat and so on."
"[Albert] Camus' was born in Algeria of French nationality, and was assimilated into the French colony, although the French colonists rejected him absolutely because of his poverty."
"I couldn't ever act or think on behalf of what my father [[Albert Camus]] would have said or done. He's an artist, he considers himself an artist, and so he takes on the responsibility of speaking for those who are not given the means or the opportunity."
"[Albert Camus] also says that nothing is true which forces exclusion. From that, you're obliged to accept contradictions if you don't want to reject certain obvious things about life, certain evidences. If you create a system, and you say 'here there is truth', in that kind of pathway [chemin], then you'll evacuate all the other pathways and you'll kill life. It's up to each individual."
"What the articles which have been written about The First Man propose is humility. The acceptance of these contradictions. Seeking an explanation is death. The lie is death in [Albert] Camus. That's why in Camus' play The Misunderstood the son dies, killed by his sister and his mother, because he lied. He never told them who he was. They killed him because they didn't recognise him."
"Everyone has so much hope for a better humanity, and many, including [Jean Paul] Sartre, turned to the idea of communism in its beginnings. Generosity had a place in people's hopes."
"For example, it's often forgotten that [Albert ] Camus was extremely hostile [farouche] towards the [Francisco] Franco regime, and right to the end. He refused to travel to Spain, he left UNESCO because UNESCO accepted Franco's Spain and allowed it a discourse."
"One thing that is evident is that [Albert] Camus could never be a 'neutral' man. This is because he was committed; look at his real physical involvement in the Resistance. He took part, there, in the combat against Nazism."
"[Albert] Camus points out that we have a lot of things to pass through. Everything has to be accepted before it can be improved."