I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.

The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.

... We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.

The soul of a murderer is blind

“To think the way you do,” he said smiling, “you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope.” “On both, perhaps.”

Camus himself described this work as 'an attempt to understand the time I live in'.

The best are led to make greater demands upon themselves. As for those who succumb, they did not deserve to survive.