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.

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.

I think [Albert] Camus felt very solitary. You can see it in all his books.

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

Today this is what we are confronted with, I mean what is pure ideology, which takes no account of the human context. In economics it's the same. Economics wanted to take into account theory over and above human criteria, or the parameter 'man'.

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.

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