Catherine Camus Quotes - Page 2

[French intellectuals] could never address themselves to the working classes. They don't know what it means, and that gives them a bad conscience about it. [Albert] Camus has a greater proximity to those in poverty.

What the articles which have been written about The First Man propose is humility. The acceptance of these contradictions. Seeking an explanation is death. The lie is death in [Albert] Camus. That's why in Camus' play The Misunderstood the son dies, killed by his sister and his mother, because he lied. He never told them who he was. They killed him because they didn't recognise him.

Love is very important in The First Man, in that [Albert] Camus loves these things he never chose, he loves his childhood experience in a very real way. Their poverty meant that there was nothing else they could think about but what they would eat, how they would clothe themselves. There's just no room for other things in his family. It's difficult for others to imagine the position in which he found himself. There is no imaginary existence in their lives.

Femininity, yes, effectively there is more in The First Man, not only in terms of women but stylistically, in its elements, the notes he wrote. You can see a real love story in it, a childhood love story, [Albert] Camus' first. Meursault [protagonist of The Outsider] and Marie were never up to much really. There is Dora in The Just and others in his plays, but they aren't so well known.

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

[Albert Camus] also says that nothing is true which forces exclusion. From that, you're obliged to accept contradictions if you don't want to reject certain obvious things about life, certain evidences. If you create a system, and you say 'here there is truth', in that kind of pathway [chemin], then you'll evacuate all the other pathways and you'll kill life. It's up to each individual.

There's no one who can say 'this person is wrong there and right here', and that 'one is right about that and wrong about this'. This is what could allow populations, or even two human beings, to live together. We will only solve problems by the acceptance of, and enrichment by, our differences.

[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.

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

Intellectuals of [Albert] Camus' age who had previously disliked him now appreciate him. And at that point we come back to literature, and it's agreed that he was always a great writer.

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.

There is an interview given by [ Jean-Paul] Sartre in the USA where he is asked what the future of French literature is, and he replies that the next great writer of the future is [Albert] Camus.

Just after the war, the liberation of 1945, [Albert] Camus was well known, well loved by [Jean-Paul ] Sartre and all the intellectuals of that generation.

[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.

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.

There are indications that today the intellectuals are coming back to [Albert] Camus. History has given them reason to, with the fall of communism.

In publishing The First Man I said to myself, 'this is going to be awful,' but awful from the point of view of the criticism. I'm not afraid of [Albert] Camus' public. I'm afraid of what will be written in the papers.

The First Man is [Albert Camus] posthumous last work. But in fact, in a certain way, it is his first, because in it you find the signs of his commitments, and of the whole way of writing as well. This mixture of austerity and sensuality, the will to speak for those not able to speak for themselves.

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

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.

[Albert Camus] really did know Algeria. He was an exile from his country, but still living in its language. Solitaire et solidaire. It's not like those who are exiled to a country where the language is not theirs.

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

Politically, [Albert Camus] was in favour of a federation, and effectively he considered that like South Africa today (or as they are trying to do), there should be a mixed population with equal rights, the same rights for the Arab and the French populations, as well as all the other races living there.

[Albert] Camus' was born in Algeria of French nationality, and was assimilated into the French colony, although the French colonists rejected him absolutely because of his poverty.

There are those who will find [Albert Camus] notions about absurdity appealing, and others who will be drawn by the solar side of his work, about Algeria, the heat and so on.