The First Man is [Albert Camus] posthumous last work. But in fact, in a certain way, it is his first, because in it you find the signs of his commitments, and of the whole way of writing as well. This mixture of austerity and sensuality, the will to speak for those not able to speak for themselves.

[Albert Camus] was viewed by many as an austere moralist, but it was on the football pitch and in the theatre that he learnt his 'morality'. It's something sensed, it won't pass uniquely through thought. It couldn't possibly.

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

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

[Albert Camus] was not an existentialist!

Just after the war, the liberation of 1945, [Albert] Camus was well known, well loved by [Jean-Paul ] Sartre and all the intellectuals of that generation.

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