When [Jean-Paul] Sartre was asked whether or not he would live under a communist regime he said, "No, for others it's fine, but for me, no." He said it! So it's hard to say just how intellectual his stance is. How can you think that never in your life would you go to live in a communist regime and still say it's fine for everybody? A very difficult thing, that, but Sartre managed it.
Catherine CamusThe First Man is completely autobiographical. The mother [Albert Camus] describes is the woman I knew, and she was exactly as he describes her. And this teacher really existed.
Catherine Camus[Albert Camus] wasn't writing under the influence of the Nobel Prize. That was an external thing for the artist in him.
Catherine Camus[Albert]Camus had denounced the gulag and Stalin's trials. Today we can see that he was right. To say that there were concentration camps in the USSR at the time was blasphemous, something very serious indeed. Today we think about the USSR with the camps also in mind, but before it just wasn't allowed. Nobody was allowed to think that or say that if you were left-wing.
Catherine Camus