Catherine Camus Quotes

[Albert Camus] positions are sensed. So, naturally, those intellectuals who don't have that experience have difficulty in comprehending it. But I think it made Camus more tolerant because he had already seen both sides of things when the others had only ever seen one. They imagine poverty, but they don't know what it is. In fact they've got a sort of bad conscience about the working classes.

I think for [Albert] Camus his mother was more than just that. She's love, absolute love. That's why it's written for her, dedicated to 'you who will never be able to read this book'.

During the '80s, those you would call the young philosophers of France, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy and [André ] Gluxman, pointed out that Camus had said things no one wanted to hear in the political arena. They said it was [Albert] Camus who was right, not those who had slid under the influence of Sartre, that is to say an unconditional devotion to Communism as seen in the Soviet Union. And ever since then the evaluation of Camus has continued to modify up until today

Just because of [Albert Camus] way of sensing before thinking. He's in a field that he often feels like escaping from. In any case, you have to learn what blood is. It all has to be rationalised. In that he feels exiled, solitary.

Of course, [Albert Camus] wasn't an existentialist, but he was a committed man. He was a man of combat. It wasn't for nothing that he directed the Resistance journal called Combat.

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

[Albert] Camus always insisted that historical criteria and historical reasoning were not the only things to take into account, and that they weren't all powerful, that history could always be wrong about man. Today, this is how we are starting to think.

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

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

I think for an artist what is most important is to touch as many hearts as possible.

[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.

I couldn't ever act or think on behalf of what my father [[Albert Camus]] would have said or done. He's an artist, he considers himself an artist, and so he takes on the responsibility of speaking for those who are not given the means or the opportunity.

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.

[Albert] Camus points out that we have a lot of things to pass through. Everything has to be accepted before it can be improved.

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] was not an existentialist!

For example, it's often forgotten that [Albert ] Camus was extremely hostile [farouche] towards the [Francisco] Franco regime, and right to the end. He refused to travel to Spain, he left UNESCO because UNESCO accepted Franco's Spain and allowed it a discourse.

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

One thing that is evident is that [Albert] Camus could never be a 'neutral' man. This is because he was committed; look at his real physical involvement in the Resistance. He took part, there, in the combat against Nazism.

Where [Albert Camus] is in exile isn't especially in Paris or elsewhere, but from the intellectual world, because of his origins.

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'.

You end up beating your head against a wall again, it doesn't work. Not if you make an abstraction of man. That's why [Albert] Camus is more a la mode now, because he always says 'yes, but there's man. That's the first thing, because myself, I'm a man.' And that's what solidarity .

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 writes his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in thanks to his teacher.

The 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.