We can't talk about the book [Albert Camus] wanted to write because we have barely its beginnings. He had written hardly any of it, but he needed to write it. It seems to me that if you look at the style of The First Man it conforms much more to who he was as a man, it resembles him very closely.

[Albert Camus] always held a profound commitment [engagement], a real resistance to all totalitarianism.

Everyone has so much hope for a better humanity, and many, including [Jean Paul] Sartre, turned to the idea of communism in its beginnings. Generosity had a place in people's hopes.

[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 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.

[Albert Camus] was not an existentialist!

[Albert Camus] was completely intransigent, and that's not at all a neutrality. It's combat, it's a man who involved himself, committed himself.