I think [Albert Camus] wanted to write something to explain who he was, and how he was different from the age that had been conferred upon him.

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.

I think for an artist what is most important is to touch as many hearts as possible.

[Albert Camus] was not an existentialist!

So time passes, and a much more political rather than literary reasoning intervenes, and from the day that [Albert] Camus wrote The Rebel, in 1955, there comes the rupture, and all, nearly all of the left wing intellectuals become hostile to him. Since he was already unfavourably viewed by the right-wing, he found himself entirely alone.

French intellectuals are mostly petit bourgeois, and it's hard to say whether that makes [Albert] Camus' work more valuable.

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