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.

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.

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] 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.

[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.

[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.

During the '80s, those you would call the young philosophers of France, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy and [André ] Gluxman, pointed out that Camus had said things no one wanted to hear in the political arena. They said it was [Albert] Camus who was right, not those who had slid under the influence of Sartre, that is to say an unconditional devotion to Communism as seen in the Soviet Union. And ever since then the evaluation of Camus has continued to modify up until today