Recognition, gratefulness exist.[ Speech for the Nobel Prize] is to show that this is what has come from what [Albert Camus] teacher did for him. And also throughout the world there are Monsieur Germains [his old schoolteacher] everywhere. That's why I published the letters, so that he could have a place in the work.

[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.

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

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

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.

[Albert Camus] started thinking through sensation. He could never think with artefacts or with cultural models because there were none. So it's true to say that his morality was extremely 'lived', made from very concrete things. It never passed by means of abstractions . It's his own experience, his way of thinking.

It's true that women appear very little in [Albert Camus] works. They have a very marginal place.