We must remember that [Albert] Camus wrote not even a third of what he had wished to.

[Albert Camus] is The First Man because he is poor, which has never been much to human beings.

The Outsider isn't [Albert] Camus, but in The Outsider there are parts of Camus. There's this impression of exile.

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] 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.

[Albert Camus]didn't have much hope that things would work out, but he wanted them to. Algeria had reached such a degree of violence that once such violence is created there's no more room for reflection. And there's no mediating position. If you look at Bosnia today, the Croats, Bosnians and Serbs, they've all created so much horror that one starts to wonder how these peoples can live together, after having done what they have. Already the violence has reached such a degree that everybody is living in hate, there's no possibility of reflection, no mediating position.

The Nobel Prize comes from outside, it's a social recognition [reconnaissance] in a way. And I think a true artist is driven by interior necessities.