The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.

The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.

Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")

A work of art is a confession.

My chief occupation, despite appearances, has always been love.

We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'