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.

Of course, [Albert Camus] wasn't an existentialist, but he was a committed man. He was a man of combat. It wasn't for nothing that he directed the Resistance journal called Combat.

Albert Camus was never abandoned by his readers. Camus is enormously read. He's the highest selling author in the entire Gallimard collection, and has been for some years now. Sales haven't ever stopped, so to talk about rediscovering him would suggest that he isn't read anymore and that's not true.

In fact it was always the Communist problem which was responsible for the opposition to [Albert] Camus. It was always and overall a political thing, a kind of misunderstanding.

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.

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.

[Albert Camus] wasn't writing under the influence of the Nobel Prize. That was an external thing for the artist in him.