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.

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.

[Albert Camus] was not an existentialist!

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 points out that we have a lot of things to pass through. Everything has to be accepted before it can be improved.

[Albert Camus] was completely intransigent, and that's not at all a neutrality. It's combat, it's a man who involved himself, committed himself.

You end up beating your head against a wall again, it doesn't work. Not if you make an abstraction of man. That's why [Albert] Camus is more a la mode now, because he always says 'yes, but there's man. That's the first thing, because myself, I'm a man.' And that's what solidarity .